A lot of people have asked me for advice on learning to code. What should I learn first? How long will it take? How can I get a job as a programmer? The answer to most of these questions is “it depends.” But there is one question that I can answer definitively. Should I learn to code? The answer is yes.

No matter what your day job is, how old (or young) you are, or what your level of commitment might be, any exposure to programming will have a notable impact on your life. Learning to code is like learning to speak a new language. With a relatively small amount of effort — just learning a few phrases really — you’ll find that a whole new world has opened up to you.

In the next few paragraphs I’ll try to say some stuff that’s relevant to as many people as possible.

My first recommendation for learning to program is to learn HTML. HTML is the language of the web. It’s relatively simple, and very forgiving of mistakes. It’s a great way to ease yourself into a very fundamental aspect of programming: syntax. Before you can make any headway, you have to learn to read and write syntactically correct code. htmldog.com has some great introductory tutorials on the subject that walk you through creating a simple web page. After a few hours you will have an understanding of a core piece of technology that billions of people use every day and which has completely transformed the world in the last two decades.

Once you have a bit of HTML under your belt, you can move on to a simple procedural programming language like python. Python is a great programming language to start with because it lets you focus on the more conceptual side of programming without having to worry about the nitty gritty details of how computers really work on the inside. What makes python especially great is that it’s not just for beginners. Some of the biggest sites on the internet were programmed in python. The most popular example is YouTube. The Beginner’s Guide on the python website has a very thorough list of resources for learning python. Ten years after reading it, I still recommend the book I used to learn python, which is available online for free: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist, co-authored by my first computer science teacher: Jeff Elkner.

If you’ve managed to navigate your way through HTML and python, then you are well on your way to accomplishing any goal you are willing to pursue.

Now a word about motivation. Programming can be hard. Programming can be frustrating. At some point you will find yourself staring at your computer screen for an hour, not being able to figure out why your code isn’t working the way you expect. This is par for the course and a normal part of the learning process. I’ll leave you with a few tricks to getting through these rough spots.

1. Try not to program alone. Two heads are better than one and 99.999% of software is written collaboratively. Working together makes problem solving a lot easier and you’ll learn more in the process. There is an entire programming methodology that is premised on two people working together. It’s called Pair Programming and you should do it.
2. Have a project. It’s incredibly boring to spend all your time doing tutorials and reading books. It doesn’t matter how big or small the project is, it’s just there to act as a test bed for all the new things you are learning. A great first project is making a personal web page about something you are interested in, or even just coding up your resumé in HTML.
3. Get involved in an open source project. There are tons of projects out on the internet that other people have started and which desperately need your help to fix bugs, build new features, or even just write documentation. Working on an open source project is a great way to improve your coding skills because you can learn from the code that’s already been written. If you are reading this and already have an open source project that you are working on, add a link to it in the comments.