What's the best way to learn to program?

What's the best way to learn to program?

Set yourself concrete tasks to achieve

Develop games. I'm not kidding one bit

Guess that sounds a bit handwavy, but writing a simple 2 way chat app over SSL+TCP is a lot better goal than "learn x programming language"

post on neet anime forum, do not try to actually write and run shit

get codeblocks
Watch buckyroberts C programming language vids

Most of us who didn't learn it in school learned it from script kiddy forums making viruses. Important thing is to have a use for what you're making, whether it's work or personal/hobby.

assign yourself a project/task and complete project/task assigned to self

dont know how? get a language reference and get to work

Dont waste you time learning it in school and just make stuff youll use.

Dont be fat, start dressing well and get a girlfriend

By programing.

learn python, it's so easy even girls and kids can do it
then move on to other things depending on your needs

Install gentoo.
Then write in Lisp only, no GUI, final destination

1) Choose first language. What do you need it for?
If you want to learn programming as a supplement for math, statistics or data analysis subjects you want to learn Python or R.
If you want webdev, you want to learn JavaScript and something else (although JS is also an option) for server-side.
If you just want to learn coding for no real reason then welcome to the world of flamewar over what language to learn where gtards will shill you C and C++ which are pain to do any real task with. Python is universally useful so consider knowing it. If you are not into loonix then consider C# if winfag or Swift if macfag.

2) Meet standard I/O. Every program implicitly starts with 3 pseudo-files to read from and write into: stdin (standard input), stdout (standard output) and stderr (standard error, kinda like stdout but should be used for logging, debugging and error and messages. You can ignore this one for starters).

3) Meet unix shell. Unix shell (for MacOS and majority of linux distributions it's Bash, not sure on Windows) makes it very easy to compose multiple commands with this simple stdin/stdout concept where it pipes program to stdout of one being stdin of other. Many times one program generates data (reads file, pulls data from website, etc.) and other separate program processes them. If initial stdin is not plugged into anything it stays as user's input; and stdout not plugged into anything prints on screen. This allows you to get more from simpler programs that do one thing.

4) Learn network. How to make UDP and TCP connections and server. Later on how TLS and certs work. At this point you should be able to make simple chat application or IRC client.

Do simple exercises, look at how better people solved it, whatever. Good luck.

best way to learn to program is first learn to make flow charts. Next iron out the assumptions you made in those flow charts and rewrite them more detailed this time. Choose a simple programming language such as C or if that is too difficult BASIC or Pascal. Once you have completely mastered these languages after a couple of years move on to C++ and after a couple of years of that start using Mnemonic Assembly Language

Which is harder, learn programming or getting a gf?

This is a big part of why the industry is borderline retarded.
Imagine if musicians only copied and played the songs they wanted to play and didn't learn any music theory or basic techniques?
I guess that's why the industry looks to hire rockstar programmers, who are slightly more skilled than the more numerous popstar programmers.

This. The best way is to frogpost on an internet forum.

The worst way would be to look up tutorials of any one of the popular general purpose languages and start programming simple scripts. Definitely don't start trying to run scripts to solve problems on projecteuler.net

find a problem important enough for you to solve through technology.
the rest will come automatically.

Programming a girlfriend

Codecademy, udacity, and Coursera helped me get a quickstart. EdX also seems good.

Just be yourself!

But seriously fags, I learnt all tutorials of C and had nothing else to do except learn more tutorials. Then I found out Chip8 emulators are quite easy and interesting. Checked out one website for details on opcodes and the fag author says "emulator is definitely not to learn programming". Wew I am too fucking stupid or some shit to do anything except random maths stuffs for programming.

SICP

Doing it
Start working on something you can find everything you need on the internet

getting a gf because that costs money whereas coding basically should always earn money. so when you have no money it's simple, really.

Teach yourself. College is for those that lack the willpower to teach them self.

Real programming™ is about finding and solving problems. It's literally just "how do I tell pieces of technology (software but really hardware) what to do in order to solve problem X?".

Learning languages is fun, sure, but it's not the core of programming. If your goal is to write a book, for instance, learning spoken languages might help you get your head around words and help you decide certain word choices, but it'll all be rather useless to the real goal of writing.