New to Programming

[Daniel Keep]

I'll throw my lot in with Lutger and say: if you are new to programming, 
learn in Python first.  It's not as fast as D, and it can't do some of 
the fancy stuff D can, but it's a *much* easier language to work with.

I mean, if you said "I want to learn programming, but I don't want to 
bother with 'easy' languages: I just want to skip straight to the 
advanced level", then I'd throw you an x86 Assembly reference (quite 
possibly concussing you :3).

I would recommend that you read through Dive Into Python by Mark Pilgrim 
[http://diveintopython.org].  It's a fantastic book for teaching Python, 
and it uses real-world examples.

As for math, I suppose it depends on what you want to do.  Application 
programming won't require that much.  AI uses a fair amount of very 
high-level maths, but it's mostly just logic and even then you don't 
really need to understand it to use the AI tools.

The most important thing in programming is the ability to solve 
problems.  The solution to, say, testing a number for primality is the 
same in Python as it is in D as it is in C, C++, C#, Java, VB, Boo, 
etc., etc.  Once you've got your algorithm down pat, the rest is just 
typing, grammar and spelling. :P

I guess the best advice I can give you is to devour everything you can. 
  Learn new languages, try solving problems in code, anything.

Sorry I can't do any better than that: being self-taught, I'm not really 
sure how I got here in the first place :P

	-- Daniel

P.S.  Don't worry too much about math.  Math scares the hell out of me, 
and I can't add two numbers to save my life, and I do fairly well for 
myself.  Obviously it's not as hard as I'd like to believe. :3