unlike lots of people on HN, who are far more experienced hackers than i am, i didn't start programming for fun until my senior year of college (i did a fair am

unlike lots of people on HN, who are far more experienced hackers than i am, i didn't start programming for fun until my senior year of college (i did a fair amount of programming for classes and internships before then, but never on my own personal projects). i was always into digital photography, so i took a crack at making some online photo galleries using python and javascript. they look pretty lame now that everything is ajax-ified and web 2.0 shiny, but 5 years ago they actually looked decent for the time period ;) my advice for newbies is to not worry so much about what book or language you want to learn, but rather to figure out one project you're truly interested in creating, and then learn the technologies that are needed to create it. i had some false starts back in middle/high school when i bought some programming books with the intention of teaching myself programming ... sure, i learned what a 'for' loop and 'if' statements were, but i never got any real traction since there was no project that i was deeply interested in hacking on. if you have a hobby project to drive you, then you'd be amazed at how fast you can learn what's needed to hack on it. best of luck!