Many people ask me many times where they can learn how to code; mainly because they mistakenly believe that Young Rewired State teaches kids how to code, we do not, we encourage peer-to-peer learning in a community of self-taught programmers, whilst they tackle social and civic challenges.
However I do also campaign for people to know how to program, even if only for a hobby, so it is fair enough to be asked. I just can never give an answer that satisfies as organisations spring up so fast, move on, morph – and anyway, just doing a an online coding course is not really going to be that exciting.
Just now, I rattled off a response to another email from a journalist on this topic, and it being Friday afternoon and after a week of travelling I was tired and cranky so rattled this off. But as I sat afterwards with my tea and biscuit(s) it struck me that actually that is probably the best response I have managed to drum up so far. So here it is for you (in no particular order):
- find some free online coding tuition in any programming language (there are loads play with as many as you can)
- get into the habit of clicking the View Source link on web pages to get an idea of what code looks like
- set up a blog with someone like WordPress and have a go with the HTML view
- explore communities such as github to learn how to share and fork code
- use communities like stack overflow to get help
- go along to hack days and learn from other people
Feel free to add useful updates, anecdotes and pointers in the comments
Emma Mulqueeny 
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the best tip I ever got, was find a geek, invite him round and buy him a pizza, get him to show you bits and pick his brains.
Yes, good tip although slightly dated, some geeks/coders are even female nowadays 🙂
It’s an old fashioned view, but maybe buy a few books?
Yes indeed, books are always the most obvious way, good point Mark
+1 for Chris’ comment – bang on. Over the last few weeks, I’ve needed to start learning some basic Ruby/Rails stuff for a project I’m helping out with (having only briefly dabbled with it beforehand, I’m very much a HTML/CSS person and don’t stray outside of this comfort zone anywhere near as much as I’d like!) – I recently learnt much more about it spending 45 minutes in a Starbucks with a friend of mine who knows what they are doing than spending a couple of days researching it online! 🙂