Out of curiosity, what have your programmer colleagues recommended? I’ve tended in the past to recommend people look into community college classes as well if they really want coursework, but not something as abstract or theoretical as many computer science courses are.

My cs classwork was largely a combination of theoretical and high level material taught in classes and practical knowledge and teamwork learned in outside homework assignments and projects. I learned a lot about the theory, teamwork, software engineering, planning. However, the actual technical aspects we were expected to learn on our own. Rarely were things like how to use command-line tools, version control, frameworks, or programming languages taught in a class setting. It was assumed you would invest the time in those things yourself and work with your classmates to learn them. I spent many hours in the computer labs learning things on my own. In many respects, I could have coasted more and gotten barely passing grades, but I had an amazing amount of access to knowledgeable people, free tools, and cheap learning materials.

I also taught and tutored others, which always is excellent for finding your weak spots. As an example of time spent, it wasn’t uncommon for me to spend several days in a computer lab during a big crunch time, emerging only for classes, sleep, and to grab food. There were also spaces for people to nap in the cs computer lab and people did use them.

It seems like several of the people who ask me are hoping that there’s some magic book or one or two courses out there. It’s a combination of several thing along with the willingness to explore, play, and problem-solving. I do find classes focus me, but ultimately if you are scared and need everything demonstrated step-by-step higher-level programming is likely to always be extremely difficult.

Sorry I’m rambling a bit, but there does seem to be an interesting misconceptions out there.

So, my own personal tips would be:

Find a project or problem you want to solve

Decide what language you are going to code in (sometimes this is dictated by the problem you are approaching – for instance if you want to extend an existing system written in PHP, I’d definitely use PHP). Popular at the moment in the web world are PHP, Python, Ruby

Get your coding environment setup. The one that I have found easiest on a Windows PC is PHP, using a ‘WAMP’ package – you can see a list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_WAMPs. I’ve used WAMP5 (now WAMPServer) and found it easy to install and use (http://www.wampserver.com/en/)

Look at other people’s code – I find this incredibly useful in learning how to do things.

I have to admit that my approach has left me with a pretty unstructured approach, and I’m missing out on some of the theoretical grounding that I think I need to really count as a ‘programmer’ – for example, although I have a vague grasp of what ‘object oriented’ programming is, and have made use of it in some cases, I’ve never really got to grips with it (this may be a reflection on my very early experiences with coding as a child which used BBC Basic – probably a UK only reference there – which used a lot of ‘go to’ statements)

I think its a shame that, in the UK at any rate, programming isn’t part of the school curriculum – a basic introduction to how computers work at this level at school I think would really make a difference to the general attitude in our society about computers.