[dragonwriter]

There's no one universally best way, but there are lots of available ways that are good, and you need to try some out and find which is best for you (self-study from books; traditional classes offered via, e.g., local community colleges; MOOCs like EdX, Coursera, Udacity, etc.; non-MOOC online interactive-learning tutorials like those offered by CodeAcademy, etc.; etc.) -- and there is no reason to limit yourself to one of these approaches. Try more than one, and keep doing more than one if you find they work together for you.

Whatever basic approach(es) you use, the most important thing is to take whatever you are getting through it and find ways of applying to problems that interest you -- that is, the most important thing to learning to programming is to practice programming.

Personally, I think the mix of convenience, structure, and cost (free) of the MOOCs is hard to beat; the self-scheduled nature of Udacity makes it the easiest of the big 3 MOOC providers to jump into an intro programming class since you can do it whenever you want. So, I'd probably recommend that as the first thing to try if you want to start learning right now. But the introductory programming offerings from other MOOC providers (particularly EdX's MITx 6.00x class) are also worth exploring, as are other approaches.