I am very novice and have no idea where to start
 

Hello all. I'm interested in learning programming but aside from knowing a little bit of html, I'm clueless.

Can anyone recommend a good place to start?

I have an great idea for a piece of software but have no idea where to start.

Any tips?

What is your idea for your program? What operating system are you running? We may be able to point you in the right direction with more information. Some programming languages are better for different things. To start out programming I would recommend C# because it’s easier then some other languages to learn. C++ is probably the most popular language, but harder to learn. Myabe even start with some Java Script if you allready know HTML.

Thanks for the quick response.

The software would be web based. Have a user friendly graphic interface. Allow users to create and manage a database and eventually use the information in the database to create forms.

Pick up "The absolutes beginner's guide to C" It was my first book on programming and its great. Amazon carries it and you can buy it used for like $7:00 American.

Thanks Nebula, I'll do that.

For a web-based application, Java may be a better fit. Plus, the Java compiler from Sun Micro is completely free and they have some good tutorials for learning the language.

For web apps with a decent interface i'd go with PHP and AJAX

But is PHP noobie friendly? (I have no knowledge of PHP)

PHP is one of the easiest languages to learn! Visual Basic is where I started out and then moved to Java and then I want to move to C# and C++. C# is a lot like Java. Java is great, in my opinion. Other believe oposite but it is the most popular language today and its high in demand career-wise. C# is high in demand also. C++ is popular around this forum. 1/3 of the people here seem to know it.

here's a link where you can look at a couple of programming languages.
http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm

Take a test run through your top 5 choices and take about 1 or 2 weeks to know all of them and read much as you can. Then decide which one you want. Thats the best way to choose one!

PHP is probably one of the easiest languages to get started in, at least in the field of web applications. PHP hosting is very cheap, and usually takes no more setup work than making sure your pages end in ".php". For those just starting out, PHP would seem ideal.

For all other types of programming, Python would seem a good place to start.