[metamemetics]

Python. Do not do the official guide. Do not read the documentation. Do something that forces you to program examples of increasing difficulty.

In short, do this course: http://cs.northwestern.edu/~akuzma/classes/EECS110-s10/index...

All the labs and assignments are online. You get to make maze solvers, generate fractals, implement Conway's Game of Life, lots of genuinely fun stuff. Just work through it and tell yourself you are doing it for fun not for work. You'll be done before you know it. Good luck!

[augustflanagan]

If you do start with Python I found Zed Shaw's Learn Python The Hard Way to be incredibly helpful when I first started learning to code some months ago.

http://learnpythonthehardway.org/

[metamemetics]

I like the link I posted because it's an intro to Computer Science in addition to Python. So in addition to introducing more and more complex Python, the problems you have to solve are meant to symbolize actual areas of CS research instead of text-based adventure game development.

And your code often gets to control graphical libraries to spice things up.

[ajankovic]

When talking about python I found http://diveintopython.org/ to be an excellent book for beginners.

[jhck]

Supposedly it's pretty dated, though; see the author's comment here: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bv9gt/dive_into...

I would recommend http://diveintopython3.org/ instead.

[imp]

The MIT course for Intro to Comp. Sci is pretty good too. There's a bunch of people working through it on my website, Curious Reef, if anyone is interested: http://curiousreef.com/class/mit-opencourseware-600-introduc...

[jessor]

I began with "Dive into Python" and switched over to Zed Shaw's "Learn Python The Hard Way" after 20 pages. His concept works great for me, somehow I manage to come up with enough discipline to actually do every exercise and the extra credits.