>>3
Well, there are some tips.
First, coding is all about problem solving. Problem solving isn't a simple task, but it's not where near impossible. The only thing that distinguishes the best coders in the world and the worst ones is that the best ones always challenge themselves, try to learn more and work on their skills whereas the latter gave up when they found something to be "too hard".
The other thing is learning how to learn -- how to teach yourself. Whenever you find something you don't understand, look in the manual. If you can't find it in the manual, google it. If you can't find it with google, ask here. Never let something slip by without understand it.
Other than that, maybe you should get a clue about what programming languages there are:
- LISP breads (Common Lisp, Scheme, etc.) are functional programming languages. Scheme is the best one to start learning from, but you might have a preference for Common Lisp or another LISP dialect later. Haskell is a "purely" functional language, but I wouldn't recommend going there for starters.
- C++/Java/C# Enterprise bullshit. Stay clear away from that.
- Python/Perl/Ruby/etc. are "toy languages". It doesn't hurt to learn one of them; they can be handy sometimes, but you won't really do anything big with them.
- Traditional languages like C are good to learn and hard to master, so you might want to do that after mastering a few languages, but you probably won't depend on C for anything big unless you're a Linuxer.