Programming

At zero.

Wilso- First, decide what it is you want to learn. Check out some books. Look on the internet for "Online computer programming courses". If you decide to get serious about this, you can take a course at a college or technical institute.

Link to Online computer programming courses

Well, what do you want to do with it & what do you want from it?

Are you gonna do website programming? Application programming? For Windows? I'd say first decide on a programming language. To do that you need to answer questions like...
Would you like your language to emphasize power over ease of use? Do you want a language that's easy to learn? A language with many free resources? A language you can easily start for free? Do you want the software you program to do databases? Do you want to program games?

I would suggest not an online course. Having to get yourself to class every week is a powerful incentive to actually do the work.

You can learn a lot from reading the textbooks, but you learn more by writing programs. Make sure you are learning something that you have installed on your computer at home.

as Phoenix said... 'First, decide what it is you want to learn'. Not just what language you want to learn, but what you want to do with it.

I started on Basic when I was a kid. Learned C (and some Fortran) in university. Then Visual Basic. VB isn't a bad place to start as a neophyte. aside form the drawback that it only writes programs for the Bill Gates universe, it is still a very powerful tool...

My first answer was both a gag, and a piece of advice. Forget what you know... computers aren't like that at all. Start at zero.

Most of the schools around here still start off with courses in BASIC. I don't think it's because BASIC is so widely used but just to get people thinking in terms of Computer logic.

BASIC is pretty simple and can be understood by most anyone and enforced the structured logic without be overly complicated.

If you can, I'd recommend taking your first few programming classes in a classroom setting. Once you get the hang of it then other sources (commercial books, on-line sites, etc..) are easier to understand.

I've already got a pretty good handle on BASIC. But I didn't think it was much use these days. I learnt that back on my old C64

MS Visual Basic .NET (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/) is one of the most popular programming languages used today. The language & OS environment have changed dramatically since you've last used it, Wilso, but having any programming experience at all is a plus, since you'll already have many of the concepts down.

I'm still on Windows 98. Looks like I'm getting close to an upgrade.