A year? Sure, with the stipulation that you have to practice doing something new every single day.

I started writing software when I was 11. (I'm 49 now.) There are a lot more learning resources available today... more computers, too.

I also started learning from scratch a long time ago (12 years). I didn't take many online courses, but learned by doing. Experience is the best teacher.

Part of being a really good programmer is recognizing business problems and offering solutions to meet those needs. The more experience you have the more exposure you've had to problems that come up all the time. Then you can say: "This works well," and "That's the wrong path to take".

But it doesn't mean you can't start doing some small projects now. Simple sites or simple applications. Maybe create things that you personally could benefit from. Then branch out to friends and family. You can even offer to do something for free (for now) just to learn and gain experience. At the same time you're building a portfolio of work you can show others.

Read this:

Teach Yourself Programming in 10 Years (Why is everyone in such a rush?)

If you want to achieve a considerable skill level fast, not wasting time on things that are irrelevant to your goals is key. Programming can be one of the worst time sinks, and simple problems can easily eat hours of your time if you're not able to step outside and think for a moment and decide not to put your time and effort into something that isn't really worthwhile. So, whatever you choose to do, programming-wise, be efficient, create a good workflow for yourself, keep it fun and choose your projects wisely.

You can learn php from w3schools.com and code academy.
Yes you become good programmer an a year. Its depend on you that how many hours you spend to learn code in a day. I am not sure that you will become a very good programmer an year. Because coding is not very easy to learn and use.Want to become a good programmer you need to do more and more practice.

I would say it still depends on your dedication to study and learn.

I learnt from scratch in 1996. I progressed HTML > JavaScript > ASP > SQL > VB6 > C#.

Web programming is really becoming complex these days though, and I'm struggling to get back into the industry after becoming complacent. These days if you want a decent job, you gotta know about bootstrapping, mocking, unit testing, source control and all kinds of other stuff. If you want to program for a living, go do a computer science major.

Really depends on how much you really enjoy it. Like anything the best are usually those that have some talent but also really love what they are doing.

Can you learn, absolutely my father at 60 picked up enough basic html, javascript and cgi php coding to build his own website for fun.

However if you want to be good you need a lot more than that. What sort of coding are you looking to do? Website front end (html, html5 for the cool stuff, css, javascript, jquery etc.) Backend stuff for websites like php, Python, Java servlets/Tomcat etc. Or app development pc or iPhone, Android etc.? Each has some similarities but also many different things to learn.

If it were me I would recommend you find a small project you could use and learn all the pieces you need to get it done. That way you can focus on the stuff that will interest you the most. It also allows you to hopefully work on something you enjoy which will help keep you motivated.

Remember it is never too late to learn

It depends of what your goal is. To become a web developer in one year is real. To become a java senior developer is unreal.
You can also become html coder in one month.

I will tell you that if you are enjoying then that is an excellent sign.
Programming is very easy if you understand your task. I mean what you want to achieve by coding.

Those were the days when you want to learn anything you need to buy a book, and what ever taught in that book, you will have that much knowledge and you are restricted to it.

But now thanks to Internet, you will never stuck anywhere. You will have solutions for all your problems on finger tips.

Before I tried to understand and sometime I even repeat code many times to remember it. But now just take the basic knowledge and then start projects by getting a great help from the net.

Believe me I am doing the programming since 1994 with different languages, but still I am always on the Internet to resolve my problems. (lol)

So, dont worry about getting too much deep just start with some project and you will automatically become proficient in any language.

Programming needs a lot of practice, a vision and aim to learn. You just need to make ur strong concepts of object oriented programming . It just depends how u do it !

Hello,

I am new at this community and I am a programmer. I started with very little knowledge and worked hard. In 1 year I became good.

My advice is to work every day and make your knowledge practical. You have to have knowledge like math to be able to write good code.

Try to learn for few months and then go to some freelancing sites where you can cash in your knowledge. Search the job advertisements and see which jobs you can do and which you can't. If you can apply , if you can't learn why you can't do it.

A good site to start is fiverr.com . You can do there simple tasks and earn some cash.

Also , stackoverflow community helps a lot to any programmer. Beginner, professional doesn't matter. Anyone can find help there.

It all depends, but basically all you need to do, get couple books, start reading and begin coding

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I really wanted to build a webpage so I started with HTML and CSS, after getting the hang of that I decided that I needed a backend and proceeded from there to learn PHP.

If you're looking to build a website you have a great many choices of languages. I would recommend PHP for the size of community and all the available information. This will be the easiest.

Another great first language is Python. It really is a fun language and yet still very useful.