Learning to program computers

This link has a programming environment called Etoys - not certain, but believe it is based on the "Smalltalk" programming language. Aimed at ages 7-15, per their website, but adults can use it as well. It is available here for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux:

http://www.squeakland.org/

Years ago, one of my parent's friends told me he would check out a book from the children's section of his local library if he wanted to learn something new, since the topic was presented in a very simplified format. Then he would buy a junior high or high school text on the subject, if he could find one, which would be more in-depth. Finally, he would buy college-level texts on the subject, at the various levels the subject was taught in colleges and universities.

The website in this post could be a first step for people to learn how to program their computers, if they so desire.

At uni they started us off on Robolab inventor for and introduction to programming. It was pretty fun, since you get to try out your programs on lego robots, and the language is very visual and simple. The only disadvantage I found was that it doesn't really merge well when you have to move on to 'real' programming languages, like in our case Java... But I guess it provides a bit of an in-road to programming, and is better than hitting the heavy languages straight up.

What kind of programming are you into, waterdragon? I have done a bit of web design / multimedia stuff (PHP, Javascript, and Flash Actionscript), all fairly mild, and I only touched on Object Oriented Programming a little in these languages, before my brain had had enough, lol. Nowadays I'm like, the less things that stimulate my intellect, the better.