I emailed John Carmack (technical director/co-owner of Id software) and asked him for some advice for a beginner programmer (read: me), and he gave a very thorough, thoughtful and helpful response, and I feel that other people should hear what he has to say.
So, without further ado, the email from JC;
When I started, computers couldn’t do much more than simple arithmetic and if statements – my first computer had 4k of memory. How I learned probably isn’t very relevant, because there are so much better resources available today.
Don’t expect it to be easy, you will have to work at it. Get a few more books from the library that cover beginning programming to go with the ones you have – sometimes a different author explaining the same thing will help a concept click. Go through all of them at least twice. Try to do every problem and exercise, don’t just read them and think you get it. Lots of people that want to program will talk a lot about programming, but not actually write that many programs. You should write hundreds of programs
If you want to get good at something you need to focus on it, which means choosing to exclude some other things from your life. Keep a little journal of what you are working on each day, you may find that you aren’t applying yourself all that hard. Learn something new every single day.
Avoid “cookbook programming”, where you copy and paste bits of code that you have found to make something work. Make sure you fully understand what everything it actually doing, and that you are comfortable applying the techniques in other situations.
It isn’t a bad idea to start in an environment that give you more exciting feedback, like visual basic, flash, or javascript, but you should try and “find the excitement” in even the most simple data processing tasks. There are layers and layers of things going on in just compiling and running the simplest program that are worth investigating.
Pay attention in school to the math classes. It is more important to be able to do basic algebra and trigonometry extremely well than to sort of get by in higher math classes. You should be able to ace all the tests and teach other people if you truly have a complete understanding of the subjects.
John Carmack