<p>If so, what language was it, and how long did it take you?...</p>
<p>VB6, not long at all. Only covered the basics. It turned out to be a very useful contributor to my understanding of C++.</p>
<p>My programming journey started with a book on VB6 when I was 13/14
I didn't get deep into VB however (played with it for about 4 months ... basically dragging and dropping); in fact, never learned what a class was, not even what passing by reference meant, bla, bla, bla. Then I got a C++ book, and the journey really did begin. I've played with DirectX, (then when I entered the OSS world: ) SDL, OpenGL, and currently Qt. Four years have passed now.</p>
<p>In fact, I basically self studied for less than a month for AP CS AB, and I believe I did great. Java and C++ are very similar in terms of syntax. And the test consists of questions requiring knowledge in basic data structures and polymorphism.</p>
<p>I think anything "visual" is probably unnecessarily difficult to start out learning. My first language was quickbasic because it came on every windows 3.1 machine and my middle school had a bunch of those. Learning a language is an evolving process so I can't say how long it "took" me, but I had made games by the end of the year maybe and made stuff like a text editor (sounds less impressive than it actually was because of how extremely simple the language was). The language had its downside in that you couldn't allocate memory or anything like that, and accessing peripherals was extremely cryptic, as the concept of a library didn't really exist.</p>
<p>I would start out with C++ because it's fairly easy to do a basic program but it's also very powerful and will grow with you. Steer clear of Java unless you want to have only superficial knowledge.</p>
<p>Edit: Probably should have specified, but some languages like qbasic had good enough help files that you could basically learn the language using only that.</p>
<p>Self taught myself 4 languages. Started with HTML, moved to PHP / SQl. Followed up with Javascript. It took only a few days for HTML, about 5ish months for PHP / SQL (due to me actually working with it maybe once every week or so) and finally Javascript took me much longer, perhaps 9 months (I hate Javascript with a passion to this day).</p>
<p>Take it from someone who has learned to program (self-taught and class) in MANY languages. DO NOT START LEARNING WITH VISUAL BASIC. It does not form good habits, it does not expose you to programming the way it is done in many languages. A lot of what you learn will carry over but it's better to start with Java, or C++.</p>
<p>Plus aside from writing windows applications VB is useless. You don't really use VB for scientific programming etc...</p>
<p>Started with C++ back in 8th grade... took about 6 months to figure out what its all about. Basically just read one of those beginner books on it, what with loops, arrays, functions, classes and what not. Moved up VB in a couple of years just to check it out (horribly boring language), then some Java and then some python, and then PHP/HTML/scripting/SQL. After C++, it never really took me any significant time to "learn" any language but I'd say it takes a couple of weeks to get used to a new one.</p>
<p>But I never dabbled very deep into any of them... and it turns out I don't really like programming too much anyway. Still love web-design and whatever it entails though.
And yeah CShuck... scripting languages really do suck!</p>
<p>learn C++...that is the best language to learn as a foundation for learning other languages. It's widely used in Engineering and other areas so it's quite flexible and with C++ you can do almost anything. Don't learn VB...I doubt anyone even uses that anymore, but I may be wrong.</p>
<p>VB (and .NET variations) are still used a lot from what I can tell... in fact, VB programmers get paid a lot because they end up making high-end windows applications for giant corporations. But its not a good language.</p>
<p>Please stop listing HTML.</p>
<p>I self taught myself Q-Basic First, then a month or so later C/C++ and NASM assembly back in 10th grade.</p>
<p>fesago, HTML is still very viable. I just applied for a job being a HTML editor making 65K a year.</p>
<p>It's just that HTML is no programming language...some of the other things listed here are neither.</p>
<p>I taught myself Basic when I was 11/12. Then I learned other things like HTML/CSS/JS/etc and when I was about 15 I started teaching myself Java and then C#. Then Perl and C/C++, I also picked up VB.NET somewhere along the way, basically the same as C#, just different syntax.</p>
<p>I would say for the first "real" language (Java) it took me maybe 2-3 months getting through 3 or 4 books. Everything that came after that was pretty easy and didn't take longer than a few days/weeks.</p>