Anyone know where I can begin to teach myself programming?

[Reiz45]

I know the basics but really need to learn more. O.k. I lied, I dont hardly know anything about programming. Any advice from you pro's on where I should begin or anything that would help me become the Goliath programmer? I mostly want to play around with building websites. I appreciate it.

[WingedPanther]

If you pick a language, then you can find a number of resources. The first question is, what language do you want to learn?

[Reiz45]

I played with HTML before - What would you suggest?

[Jordan]

I think you should learn HTML better before you progress to any other type of web development. How far did you get?

[Reiz45]

I built a very basic webpage. Nothing advanced

[Fjeddy]

HTML is very different from most "proper" programming languages like C++ or C#. Don't do like me and try to learn absolutely everything at once, if you try to do too much, you might just end up getting bored and lose interest in programming totally.

I know I did. Luckily I had my mates around, they pulled me up, brushed me off and got me back into it (much obliged ).

[nKryptd]

cout<<"hi there, well.. do you have a passion for programming?
start with command prompt using the "HELP command"
it will give you a list of commands you can use n mix and create batch programs and "wiruses" if you wanna. importantly it will teach you important bits of the syntax of code.
got to go will be back!!!!"

[G_Morgan]

I'd learn HTML and CSS, once you're comfortable with them I'd have a look at JavaScript. Finally I'd look into some sort of server side scripting (I can recommend Ruby on Rails for this but there are plenty of options).

[Uninverted]

Well, programming and website building aren't completely the same. If you want to continue to learn how to make websites, you should probably just keep trying to get better at html and maybe look at a scripting language like PHP or JavaScript. If you want to write programs (games, spreadsheets, text editors, etc.), then I would start with a simple language like Python (really really simple syntax so you can focus on learning the concepts). If you want to do both, take a look at Java; you can write standalone programs or embed it in web pages (I wouldn't recommend it to start off with though). Or, if you enjoyed all the parenthesis in this post, you could try Lisp.

[G_Morgan]

Are there any decent frameworks or web libraries written in Lisp? I really like Lisp but it badly lacks the necessary mind share to do any real damage outside of high end expert systems, general AI and such where they need all the dynamism and really don't care about libraries.

Doesn't help that CLisp basically shakes it's behind at the standard* and SBCL doesn't run on Windows properly as of yet. Then the two proprietary options (Allegro and LispWorks) cost more than a house. If SBCL could be fully ported to Windows it would do a lot to help Lisp (along with some decent bindings to at least one GUI framework). Until there's a decent implementation that works across platforms I reckon it will stay as it is though. A nice idea but not enough work behind it to make it as a useful platform.

The only place you really see a lot of Lisp these days is as an extension language - elisp, autolisp, etc. I think Jax and Dexter used a Lisp dialect as it's scripting language as well.

*nearly every attempt by me to write portable code between Linux and Windows was ruined by CLisp's 'we hate Common Lisp' motive. Required huge amounts of #+sbcl(do this) #+clisp(do that).