Starting programming

Learning programming can be likened to learning a foreign language (which in fact it is). If you are not very studious, programming probably isn't for you (except maybe as a hobby), as very precise syntax (which must be learned) must be followed for each programming language.

Programming does tend to require a good bit of study as it is very exacting and precise. Close won't work. How hard it is depends really on your grasp of the language, its syntax, and understand the methodology of programming...some people find it very easy. I didn't...but it wasn't any harder than learning networking...just different.

I would probably take a look at Visual Basic to start with. It's quite easy, the structure (language wise) is easy to translate and it is functional. It wouldalso be an introduction to programming in other languages like C++ etc.

If you're just wanting to dabble a little and see if programming is for you, I'd grab a couple of books on VB (the Dummies books are good, but very rudimentary) and give it a try. Who knows...you may be a natural!

Good luck....

I would agree with Alpha-Male that VB might be a good language for you to start on. A large part of VB programming is "drag and drop" in nature, and the rest (the actual coding) is as simple as programming gets.

However, I would disagree with Alpha-Male that VB is a good introduction to other languages. "Classic" VB (that is, not VB.Net) is stuck in object-pergatory...it's not quite procedural and it's not quite object-oriented. As a result, you will not properly learn either structured procedural programming nor object-oriented programming. You'll have to re-learn these concepts and break bad VB habits when you migrate to another language like C, Java ,or C++.

Good luck.

Jay

A good link for resources is Tech Republic's siter site www.builder.com.com
Subscribe to the e-mails on all languages that interest you, and within a few weeks, you will have a wealth of links to useful web sites.

Chas

I would suggest searching for programming tutorial sites. Here are some good ones to get started (not sure what language you are looking for but this is a good start).
www.w3schools.com
www.findtutorials.com
www.zvon.org
www.codeproject.com

Enjoy!

Since you are a network person as you say, I would recommend low-level capable languages such as C/C++.

Learning C/C++ is also a plus should you want to learn languages for web such as Java, which has syntax and behavior much like C/C++.

Programming should be be moderately difficult to begin with but as you go along you should be able to appreciate it.

www.builder.com presents good insights on this issue.

good luck.

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