Do you have a favorite open source project? Download the source and try to build the runtime files yourself. Then you have an environment to poke through the co

Do you have a favorite open source project? Download the source and try to build the runtime files yourself. Then you have an environment to poke through the code and play with. for example, do you like Python? download the source and create a debug build of it. Another thing to do is to go to code samples online at the example sites. Type them in and/or download them and play with them. Yet another thing to try is to do a port of a program to another platform. Even if you are not successful, you should learn a lot. The key is to take more than one approach, as there is no one right way, there is not one true path. Immerse yourself in different programming activities. The important part is practice, practice, practice, like the story on going to Carnegie Hall. Me? One of my earliest bigger projects was porting an old star trek game written in Altair basic to Apple Basic. I had only mimeographed printouts published in a book of computer games back in the 1970's. Arrays were not handled the same between the two versions of basic, so I had to come up with a different array scheme than was in the book.