So How Do You Learn? Read a Good Book
While this may sound counterintuitive, one of the best ways to learn is to get a good book on programming. If you're specifically interested in a single language, the O'Reilly Learning series is an excellent way to start. Each book provides exercises and answers, as well as full programs demonstrating the concepts being taught. O'Reilly's web site has oodles of articles, code and insights from the best in their respective fields. You can browse it at O'Reilly's.
Look at Other People's Programs
Almost every good programmer started off looking at how programs worked, and then learning from them (mistakes and all). This is a good way to see how someone else approached a problem or task, and then translated it into computerspeak.
A good place to start is Hotscripts.com. They have programs tackling a variety of issues, from simple to complex, in a variety of programming languages. You can download the ones that are close to what you are interested in, and read them.
Get a Good Editor
As you can tell from our examples, it takes a lot of code to get the computer to do even a simple task like printing a list of your CDs. And with all those brackets and semi-colons, it's pretty easy to make one little mistake that ruins the whole thing. Say you leave out a comma, next thing you know you're crying in your Diet Coke because all you're getting back is a blank page where your data should be.
To write clean code, it helps to have a good program that can handle all the nuances of programming. These blank editor programs help you find missing brackets, alert you to syntax and function issues and even help "pretty it up" so you can read it more easily when looking for that missing comma.
While there are many language specific editors to start off, if you're on Windows, try Maguma Studio Lite and TextEdit. For Macs, BBEdit is the gold standard of text editors, but there are many others available through the Apple Site or through Version Tracker. If you're a Linux chick, you may want to look at Bluefish (a great editor and a cute fish to boot).
Read a Good Book
