The best resource I've seen is the Pragmatic Bookshelf Learn to Program, by Chris Pine. A good friend of mine who had no programming background whatsoever went

The best resource I've seen is the Pragmatic Bookshelf Learn to Program, by Chris Pine. A good friend of mine who had no programming background whatsoever went through that book this August, enjoyed it and made great progress. It was enough that he found himself writing small scripts to help organize research at his pysch research job. The fact that he could occasionally save 15 minutes of work by spending 5 minutes to write a small chunk of code, kept it useful and kept him at it. The book uses Ruby, but what it really teaches is programming. My friend has since picked up quite a bit of Python and even a bit of JS with very little difficulty now that he understands functions, classes, iterators, blocks, etc... In fact, what I saw impressed me so much that I've bought a copy to work through, even though I'm already writing basic flash games in AS3. http://pragprog.com/titles/ltp2/learn-to-program http://pragprog.com/titles/ltp2/learn-to-program