Learn C#?
 

I've got virtually NO programming experience, first off. However, I've been reading some books that are inspiring me to give it a try...

Programmers - do you think is feasible?

That's like asking if getting into car racing is a good idea.

It depends on your skill, patience, and temperment.

I started with VB4, then COBOL, then Aion.

Once you learn one language, its very easy to pick up a second, and nothing to pick up a third.

I would pick a language to learn that would be the most useful to you.

so what do you suggest?

I personally think it's a great idea to hop in a racing car...

Is this for work? Just to pick up a skill in your spare time?

JAVA, if that's your thing. . .

Personally a semester of FORTRAN and two semesters of C++ made me realize that I wanted NOTHING whatsoever to do with writing computer code. Interesting? Sorta. Give me an appreciation for what computer technology could do and an understanding of the software engineering process? Yep. Like it? No way.

Jeff, if your first language was FORTRAN, I've got to say that everything is different now...and still exactly the same.

Yea, it was old VAX FORTRAN. Good exercise in thinking about creating algorithms to model things in the real world and what-not, but the idiosynchracies of the language were HORRIBLY cumbersome - all throw-backs to the old punch-card format (you could see how it directly translated into a lot of the requirements). It was interesting, but it takes someone with a certain kind of neural wiring to get into computer programming. I left those courses quite solidly convinced that I wasn't one of those people. No matter how much I tried or how conceptually interesting the stuff was, I just could NOT bring myself to like coding. At all.

Don't start with C#, or Java.
Stay away from object oriented languages to start. Begin with C, or Pascal or Basic. These things will teach you how to string your code together, how to optimize things. Then introduce multi-threading then OO languages.
If you know Java then C# should just be named 'Microsoft Java'..... However if you're going from very little/no experience then it can be quite a challenge. I bought a book written by (IIRC) Jon Sharp and a second fellow. They were on the development team for C#, and it is a very good book. About 700 pages and ~$110 but worth every penny.

If you do decide to get into it, there is a superb book by Andrew Troelsen called C# and the .net platform. Its on Appress. The guy has a very nice, relaxed writing style. Uncommon for a programming book.

C - Get the Kernigan and Ritchie book for starters.

Once you are comfortable go for Strousop's C++ book.

Fun stuff as far as non-Porsche things go.

I remember a contest someone had a few years back involving a prize to whomever could write the most enigmatic and confusing C++ code. The winner was a guy who wrote code using no discernable words (only individual letters and "shortcut" symbols) to compute the value of "e" (natural log). When the code was printed out, the ASCII characters and associated spaces made the piece of paper print out the symbol for "pi" when viewed from a couple of feet back. Pretty clever really. . .

I believe it's called the "Obfuscated C Code Contest".

(...)

Yep: http://www1.us.ioccc.org/main.html

And let me just say, OMFG. I believe I once had to debug someone's code that looked just like this: http://www1.us.ioccc.org/2004/gavin.c

I second Zero10s advice. Start with a structured language like C or Pascal. This will allow you to grasp the fundamentals of programming logic without the oop stuff getting in the way. The Kernigan and Ritchie book is what I used in College.

+1. I even started out on keypunch cards. Fortran IV. I hate computers to this day.

Nope. Learn mono instead. It is just like C# only it is Free, so you won't have to spend $$ on MS Dev software.

I disagree.

I work in a shop with a lot of 20+ year coders and a lot of kids fresh out of college. Most of the college kids have never known a strictly procedural language. I had an intern this summer who only knew Java. I had him writing code in Aion (another OO language) within an hour, and writing good code unassisted within a day.

I'm working with training another analyst who only knows COBOL (and has done only that for over 20 years). He has a real hard time with concepts like inheritance, the difference between instance methods and class methods, and the difference between instance attributes and class attributes. I've been working with him for six months and he can write a piece of code just fine, but he can't design an OO program for the life of him.

The advantage of the newer OO languages like C# and Java are that they are accessible and widely used. You can pick up a book on them at any book store. Someone trying to learn an older procedural language may have a hard time finding good training materials outside of a large IT shop, and the companies that do produce the materials tend to charge quite a bit for them. (Not to mention software licenses...)

+ 1 from this ASP/.NET/C#/Perl/VB/PHP/Python guy.