I have been thru the same a few months ago. Let me tell you what worked for me. Start by picking a language. Which one you choose will depend on why you want t

I have been thru the same a few months ago. Let me tell you what worked for me. Start by picking a language. Which one you choose will depend on why you want to be a programmer. My goal is to develop a web app for a startup so I looked at popular languages with popular frameworks. I chose Django/Python over Ruby on Rails. Playing with a framework gave me some quick returns for minimal effort. So the rewards kept me going. Quickly though you realize that you need language expertise. That's when I hit the books, sought assignments and problems (e.g. Project Euler). One last tip, set some mini-projects with limited scope as goals - one after the other. Make sure their complexity increases. This will serve as a ramp up, but also the sense of completing a project becomes a sort of self-reward. The projects may also server as a portfolio.