[tombert]

I'm actually not entirely sure how I learned how to program (I'm self-taught); I doubt it was just "one magic thing", but I am a big believer in the "learning-by-doing" approach for this kind of stuff.

If I recall, I think the thing that made everything stick was me reading through one of those "Sams: Teach Yourself C in blah days", then downloading Code::Blocks and making a very simple OpenGL application involving bouncing boxes (which happened to coincide with the physics class I was taking). I remember using that book for reference for when my code wasn't compiling, but I found it difficult to derive "some example where I calculate a Fibonacci sequence" to "making cool stuff like a game" without just ditching the book and trying it.

tl;dr, I somewhat agree with this article. You have to figure this stuff out for yourself to really "understand" it and become a good programmer. It's a language, after all. You don't just learn French by reading one intro-to-french book.

[travmatt]

I’m much the same and I always feel odd trying to answer that question. I learned programming by immersing myself in the subject and trying and reading and talking about as much as I could. There was never a magic bullet, besides the fact that the returns on persistence began to compound.