I started programming in the old, dark days of pre-internet when the only ways to learn programming for a young lad was to either find a book on the subject (In

I started programming in the old, dark days of pre-internet when the only ways to learn programming for a young lad was to either find a book on the subject (In Iceland the books were pretty rare at the time), find a older more experienced person to teach me or just hack at it myself. I went with the last option. I spent many hours staring at the DOS based Pascal IDE and in-built help documents. I managed to create a few programs on that which laid the foundation for when I got into C++. After a few years of learning on my own I found that I could not find a job working on code until I got my education which caused me to go get a university education at the age of 26. Now I have a couple of years of development experience both using C++, Python, Javascript and a myriad of other supporting languages. Today, all you need to do to learn to code is to code. You have the wealth of the internet at your fingertips. Choose a language, find a project and code. Create games if you have no ideas. Clone existing games (Like Tetris, Simcity or somesuch). In this industry the old adage "Mileage matters" applies. Eventually, before you know it, you will be churning out production ready software. I know I cant pinpoint the exact method I used to get there. All I can tell is that somewhere along the way, through millions of keypresses in multiple programming languages, I picked up the right habits. You can do it to :) Just go build stuff! (Oh and regarding the operating system question. The OS does not matter at all. You can code in all of them. I started out in windows. Currently using linux for my dev work. Its just a matter of preference)