[gregjor]

I learned programming over 40 years ago, mainly from reading books and experimenting, and reading a lot of code. Studying code until you understand it takes time but rewards the effort.

Jumping in and hacking until you get something to work only goes so far. Without some fundamental knowledge, whether from books or school, you can only get so far.

Agree that you have to start writing code to build up skills. You can’t learn just from reading.

[drweevil]

Same. I was in the Army. We started seeing CP/M computers with 8" floppies, Wang word processors, etc. So I bought an Atari 800 and cassette data recorder from the PX to start learning. No Internet then; so magazines like Byte, Antic, & Analog were crucial for getting the gist of things. For hacking I started with Atari Basic, then moved on to OSS MAC/65 & OSS Action!. It was a lot of fun. So, you do need to read some, to get the lay of the land; but you also need to do.

[arthuryuzbashew]

Wow, what language was that you learned ?

[gregjor]

Starting in high school age 14: BASIC, assembly language (HP2100), Fortran, Pascal, PDP-11 assembly, C, COBOL. in the first five years of programming.