Here's my advice, based on writing code since 1985 or so, for people who want to learn programming. There was a thread about it and I figured I should save my advice in case others would like to get started.

I think it's great that you start with Python. This lets you learn the principles of programming without a lot of strange punctuation. Free downloads and tutorials are at python.org.

There is a lot to good programming beyond writing code. Code writing is like the...