[astine]

If your concern is about contributing to open soource software, you don't need to know how to code to contribute. Bug reports are actually hugely important and some projects take financial donations.

As to learning to code, there are actually a lot of good resources. http://learnpythonthehardway.org/ Is a good book which will show you the basics and get you started with a lot of practice. The Khan Academy also has some introductory videos: http://www.khanacademy.org/cs/tutorials/programming-basics. In addition, you can find tutorials for just about any language and they'll also show you some of the basics.

Oh, and Visual Basic, while arguably being shitty, is a real programmng language, so if you understand it, you already know how to program. You just need to learn a more useful language.

[roryliam]

Thank you for those links. I think I will make more of an effort to contribute to projects in non-coding ways while I learn to code.