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[Briggsy16]

I've always wanted to learn a coding language and never got round to it.

Does anyone have a suggestion of what language to learn? Easiest? Should I start with an easy language and learn to use that then learn another?

More importantly, is it best to get some kind of book? Or are there some awesome tutorials and resources out there in the interwebz?

I would like to aim to make a game or something if I could. A dream of mine I guess.

[alfie275]

C++, download C++ Primer, Fourth Edition.

Also I made some tutorials, pretty crappy, but here are 2 of them:
http://alfie275.blogspot.com/2009/08/c-tutorials-part-2-my-first-program.html
http://alfie275.blogspot.com/2009/10/c-tutorials-part-3-functions-and-ifs.html

[Briggsy16]

What is the book like?

Is C++ the best one to learn?

[Flaming Dorf]

I learned C++ first, and it has made my life so much easier. Higher level languages like Python come naturally to me after getting used to the (relatively) low level of C++.

[Virex]

It's hard to say what language to start with since we only learn our first language once. It's safe to say that most mainstream languages are sufficiently documented to learn it for the first time (while the same is true for some esoteric languages, learning those is often quite useless. You can hardly beat the documentation for Brainfuck's features though). Pick one that looks interesting and dive in

[Briggsy16]

It is the most widely used language in software industry. But apart from that if you learn one language, learning others is pretty simple, as they don't differ much.

I have uploaded the book: http://www.mediafire.com/?kd5hc311djchawf

Because it is in digital form it is fully searchable.

Wow thanks!

I'll take a look

Thanks for the help guys

How do I write and compile? What application should I use?

[Flaming Dorf]

How do I write and compile? What application should I use?

For learning purposes, I recommend Quincy.

[alfie275]

I would recommend Code::Blocks.

[Normandy]

I would second Quincy as a starting IDE. Code::Blocks pretty complex for a beginner, you'd be better off using a minimalistic editor for now.

[Briggsy16]

Got Quincy and started going through that book. Enjoying the challenge of finding problems in the coding at the minute

[ILikePie]

If you're running Windows, take a look at Microsoft's Visual Studio too. I use Emacs, gcc, and GNU make, they're fun to use, but aren't very intuitive.

[Khazad_Dron]

I remember I started my journey into programming from Dark Basic. It was marketed as a programming language that even "a fool can comprehend"  (inaccurate citation from my side). I thought, well, that's for me! That's what I needed. And indeed they had really nice tutorial explaining such basic concepts of what a "variable" is, what a "string" is and etc. It definitely helped me to move forward and gave me a feeling that it's not a "rocket science".
I've played with Dark Basic for two or three months and then moved to C/C++. Then there was Python, which came really easy after C++.
But I don't advocate Dark Basic. It worked for me, but I would rather recommend you to start from Python. There are plenty of books online and it's very easy to learn due to it's interactive nature.
Starting from C++ is also an option. Though a harder one. Option for those, who think that "what does not kill us, makes us stronger" 
But here's an argument for taking an option B: switching latter from C++ to something else is almost painless, but reverse is not true.

Have fun and good luck.

Regards,
Andrei

[Briggsy16]

That's why I went with C++ really. I like to struggle at something, it makes me feel good when I succeed.

Plus like you say, it has a certain 'backwards compatibility' with other languages.

[winner]

try colorForth it can be as low level as you need but easily lets you get as high as you want.  It has syntactically significant color .

[Ari Rahikkala]

Ah, the "what programming language should I learn first" question. Every time someone asks this, regardless of where, they get a large set of wildly different answers. As far as I can tell that still holds even if they ask the best programmers and programming instructors in the world. You know what that means? It means that, in all likelihood, that there's no obvious reason to prefer any of the usual suggestions above another, and you're fine just picking any mainstream language.

Aside that, be sure to get a decent grasp of the basics of software engineering and computer architecture. Don't copypaste other people's code, do use other people's libraries. Don't go from reading one tutorial to another, do practise and exercise yourself. Don't give too much credence to any single programming paradigm - back in the fifties there used to be silver bullets in programming, singular advances that brought the field forward by huge steps... but then we invented subroutines and information hiding, and ever since software engineering has been a constant pitched battle between several different paradigms of which each tends to have some advantages over the others in some domains and disadvantages in others.