So I know that is a very generic title but I couldn't really think of anything better so just hear me out. I want to learn code. I have for a long time now and I have tried before but I didn't succeed. I think that the reason I haven't been able to learn is the things I want to do are things like making games and programs and other things that require high level programming and I don't care much for the low level programming. So my question is how can I learn programming by doing things that interest me and are in my skill range? I would like to learn python. Also followup question what is a good python program for windows?
You could learn python in windows but it would be a little slow. It would be easier to have a linux setup because you could make a utility really easily. For example I am making a GPU fan utility because the new radeon drivers turn my fan off for some reason. This is really easy to do. Get the string that you run in the terminal and integrate it in.
You could learn Lua as well. Lua is easy.
Go look up eclipse as that is what I started using. You can also get MS Visual Studio Express for free. Past that look up some free classes on corsera or look up some guides on youtube.
I'd use notepad++ in Windows. While visual studio and eclipse are good tools, there's a lot of features that could be confusing early.
Additionally, I'd run Cygwin for learning Python on a Windows box. That just seems much easier than dual booting if you have no experience with Linux.
Finally learning to consume web API's is a very useful (and marketable) skill. One of the easiest is the wow armory API since you don't need a login or anything to consume it. After that getting into authenticated API is an easy feat.
Another fun project (but deep) is to try and install a Wordpress site with XAMP and then see how much of the site you can get to render based on what's in the database. It'll teach you how to reverse engineer things and figure out some database conventions at the same time.
I hope that helps. I went into Python knowing how to do simple sql, and Wordpress was the only thing I could think of that is easy enough to not get overwhelmed right out of the gate.
one usually needs to understand lots of complex stuff one needs to understand when making fancy looking games - albeit things like unity help, a lot. Start by studying the mechanics of some old games from the mid to late 80s to start with. Sokoban and supaplex and wolfenstein and oregon trail, graphics are just a tool that helps tell the story and that makes the puzzle look different.
web development is another type of programming gateway drug - usually there's usually high levels of gratification to be found very early in the development process thanks to html that makes it so that if you can write a string, you can lay things out on the screen easily. It's also really easy for multiple people to take advantage of what you build, python comes with lots of stuff built into the standard library to make web development easy.
What kind of job do you do day to day? There's usually opportunities for people to build software that fits into something they do day to day, it's usually how some of the most successful types of software are born, because there's a purpose to them, they're not random time wasters. Is there an itch out there in the real world, that you'd like scratched by technology.
Qt might be something to look at if you want to be making non-web stuff with a GUI. There's a GUI designer that comes with it.
PyCharm is a popular python IDE. (personally I just use syntax highlighting text editor with some plugins for this and that).
I use(d) IDLE on windows, but on linux i like to use spyder. There is also a python library tailored for games called pygame, and freely available book to get started
http://learnpythonthehardway.org/
Notepad++ works great
Although starting with C or C++ is going to give you a lot more options I'd say
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