Learn To Program

There are many resources to help you learn to program. Much depends on what you want to do. Are you interested in creating web pages, mobile applications, blogs, etc? I’ll post a few favorites to get you started even if you have never done anything like this before. Chances are good you will find that this is a lot easier than you imagine. I started when I was in junior high. Anyone can learn to do this but it takes practice.

Web Development

http://www.w3schools.com/
Start on the left top menu on the page and work your way down. This will take you few months. Do one or two lessons a day. When you get through these tutorials, you’re going to be well on your way to creating web pages.

https://php.net/docs.php
While you are working on the W3Schools PHP tutorial, start reading the content on this site. PHP is a computer language that lets you create web pages. It is used by WordPress and many other popular web applications. Learn this and you will be able to customize your blog sites. People get paid well to do this so work hard to learn it.

Blogging

http://wordpress.com/
Setup a free account and start learning everything you can about WordPress. Eventually you can learn to have WordPress on your own website but this is a great start.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Main_Page
As soon as you setup your free WordPress.com site, start reading through these documentation pages. It will show you how it works and you’ll learn a lot of new things that you never thought to do before. A lot of people need help setting up personal and business websites.

You can do a lot with WordPress. It is very flexible and you can make it look like many different things. Learning to customize how it looks is where people need the most help.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/
WordPress Plugins are where it gets fun. You can make WordPress do anything and odds are good someone else already has done it. Rather than re-inventing the wheel, you can install plugins to give your website functionality that doesn’t come with the base installation. Browse through the plugins at the link above and you will see what I mean.

Now What?

YouTube is one of your best resources for anything. There are dozens of programming tutorials available on just about any topic you can think of. If you get stuck on anything and it doesn’t make sense, type in the keyword for the subject. For example, if you are trying to get an overview on PHP for the first time, type in PHP Beginners. You will get introduced to the entire language. If you do better listening to someone tell you about something rather than reading about it, try watching YouTube videos.

C#

You are never going to stop learning. C# is a versatile language by Microsoft that is used by the majority of businesses to write business applications. You will want to learn it. Search on Google or YouTube for C# for Beginners or C# Tutorial and you will get a great introduction.

Jobs

Once you can demonstrate some level of proficiency (that you can gain by doing programming projects for other people), you can get hired to do this full-time. Posting a resume online at Monster.com, Careerbuilder.com, Jobing.com, Indeed.com, and Dice.com will introduce you to a variety of headhunters and job recruiters who are looking to fill software development positions in your area.

The benefit to learning software development skills is that you can potentially work anywhere for anyone without borders. You can take on projects for anyone in the world. As long as you keep learning, you can keep working.

Some of this is simplified a bit but the links above will get you started. If you are a self-learner, you can do well. You don’t have to go to college. School definitely helps because some people need a structured learning environment. It helped me but it’s not a requirement to work once you can demonstrate your skills.