I don't think it's suspicious, it's just very sad (to me, I mean). The OP says they are an economics major - they probably would never think to post a question

I don't think it's suspicious, it's just very sad (to me, I mean). The OP says they are an economics major - they probably would never think to post a question on economics entitles "MIT female economist seeks OECD data". sigh Anyway as to the question, the best way of learning to code is (a) by doing and (b) by exposing yourself to those who do it well. If you have your own project to work on already that's great, otherwise find an open source project and cut your teeth onto that. Most languages have standard libraries or modules, take a look under the hood and try to understand how they work. Since you specifically ask for websites, try hanging out on stackoverflow.com and try and answer some questions before looking at the answers. Contrary to others, I probably wouldn't recommend C - please let's not start a language war, but for someone who may or may not decide to focus on programming it's probably better to focus on a higher level language like perl, python or ruby in the beginning. Also, I don't know if/how MIT supports co-ops/internships, but try and get a short (3-4 month) programming placement, there's nothing like having to do it "for real".