People keep asking me about how to learn programming. Before Steve
Jobs killed it, Apple's HyperCard was by far the best way to learn programming.
There never has been anything like it before nor since, but it only ran
on classic Macs. Before Microsoft killed VisualBasic(v6) and replaced it
with a completely different (and incompatible) product with the same name,
VB6 was a reasonable second for people with lesser computers. Both of those
are gone now, and they can't run on current computers anyway.
A distant third place is JavaScript. It's free and runs on all modern computers . There are numerous free JavaScript tutorials, but their focus is on making web pages interactive -- which is what JavaScript was designed for -- and that may be good and useful, but it's not what I have in mind. JavaScript is in fact a complete programming language. Like HyperCard and early versions of Basic, it is interpreted, so you can make changes and try again quickly. That's useful, because most of programming is about making mistakes and trying to figure out where. God gets His creation perfect ("very good") on the first cut; the rest of us debug our work, over and over.
The complete (free) course I did last year (+St+Fn+Dt+Db+Bx+In)
Lesson #0 in this revision
The video for Lesson #0
Rev. 2019 September 24