Hilo- My name is Enny. I am wanting to learn from ground up the skills to program/code/etc. I am not COMPLETELY ignorant with computers. IE., I know how to install software, send email, have web meetings....the basics I am ok with. But I would like to know the most thorough tutorials or classes to take (free) to be self taught so that eventually I can stay at home and make money! Also I have never used Linux before. I have always been slave to windows. Why is Linux a better choice for Windows alternative???
THanks,
Enny

Soliciting an answer from thousands of people in a forum is more or less the same as entering an internet search about learn coding for free.

Personally, I have gone through a few lessons on freeCodeCamp.org and liked it. It does start at level 0. It doesn't teach C, C++, Java and system programming, but application development with HTML, CSS, Javascript, node.js etc. When you sign up, you get access to courses and community resources, and as a bonus the occasional inspirational email telling stories about people who got lucrative jobs after six months of participating in the program.

Why is Linux better? It's less a commercial endeavour than Windows. Of course, Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical and others want to be profitable, but since they depend on open-source, they will make sure all they do is open. Even though Microsoft is happy to make a lot of stuff available free of charge to individuals and especially developers, and a lot of free software (both beer-free and liberty-free) from other sources exists on Windows, you still have to deal with EULA's, license agreements and the like. The biggest factor is probably that you don't have that much control over the Windows platform, whereas you can fully control any Linux distro or *BSD.

With Linux you might be able to know your system and make it do what you ask and only that.

Uh, just said you might : that's because nowadays not every distro would let you do that easily. Slackware does this. (and perhaps a few more)

Welcome to LQ.
Do you have any programming experience, on any platform?

Programming is about learning to “instruct” a computer to do what you want it to do. It involves both logic, which computers are very literal about, and syntax...the rules of the language with which you’re implementing the logic.

You can certainly find tutorials about either thing on the ‘net. The logic always made sense to me. I had trouble learning syntax until I had a real thing I wanted to make a computer do. The class I took in C made no sense to me (and I’d been making my living as a programmer for about 15 years when I took it) because the things the class wanted me to make the computer do made no sense to me...that, and it was/is a 2.5 generation language, and I’d been working in 4GLs back then.

But I digress. Find something you want to make a computer do. Decide which language you want to use, and begin.
Back in the day, the “beginner” language was BASIC. These days maybe python, Perl or PHP to start. Other members: Your thoughts?

Tell us about your programming experience. Ask questions when you get stuck. Have fun.
Good luck. 🍀

Not Perl. PHP? Limited to the web.

Probably Python. Fairly intuitive and easy to start with, no need to compile and link, and it has advanced features like object-oriented and functional programming. It also provides introspection, which is an alien concept to me. Very useful for web programming, too.

MIT's programming courses used to be based on Lisp, but ten years ago they decided to use Python instead (this link is an interesting discussion by itself, about learning how to program and about fitness of programming languages).