I'm in the process of teaching one of my friends how to program. He's starting off with almost no knowledge, but he's a smart guy, so hopefully it won't be too painful.

The #1 thing I told him to do is start by programming small, useless programs and work up to more and more substantial programs. The more you program, the more you learn, and you build on that wealth of knowledge. And more importantly, you learn how to avoid the mistakes that you made from your previous programs. I'm in the process of learning Scala on my own, and this is the tract that I'm taking as well, and I've been programming for years now.

And in the process, the key thing you learn is perseverance. If you don't have perseverance, there is no way you can be a programmer, because that is the life of a programmer. You hit roadblock after roadblock, and you need to figure out how to get around those problems by yourself. You have to try 100 times to fix a problem, so that the next time it might only take 97 times, etc, etc.