ReadWriteWeb

Do you want to build a game for Android, a theme for your blog or a twitter desktop client? Have a great idea but lack the development chops to take it from the pages of your legal pad to the App Store? Want to make sure your kid learns to program, even though your local school system may not offer the best options? This post should give you a good starting point for learning to program.

We have many developers who read ReadWriteWeb, so this post is meant to both be a help for aspiring programmers and a place for those of you with much more knowledge than I, to drop in suggestions. Please let me know what we've inevitably left out.

Code School, the collection of online participatory course we covered previously, has a new course called Functional HTML5 & CSS3. The course consists of videos introducing concepts, followed by online tests to prove you've learned the material. You can't move from one lesson to another without correctly answering the questions. The course costs $45.

For those wondering, the course title means functional as in working, not functional is in functional programming.

Essential JavaScript Design Patterns For Beginners is a recent free mini e-book by by Addy Osmani. In addition to covering a several useful JavaScript design patterns, Osmani covers what design patterns are, what makes a good pattern, the structure of a pattern and anti-patterns. This is a great resource for a beginner.

The website for Stanford University's Computer Science 101 contains lecture notes and interactive JavaScript exercises, and is available for free to the public. The exercises can be completed within the browser.

The technology used to create the in-browser exercises is discussed here.

Clojure is a dialect of the LISP programming language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine. It's becoming increasingly popular as a modern functional programming language. This week O'Reilly Radar blogger Stuart Sierra called it "the hot new language of the moment." He describes Clojure as "Lisp meets Java with a side of Erlang." Interested? Here are a few free resources to get you started.

We've covered several programming languages now, but we haven't really gotten into database development yet. Although NoSQL is hot, SQL (structured query language) isn't going away. Different databases (such as Oracle, MySQL and PostgreSQL) use different variations, but the idea is to have a unified system so that a developer can move from database to database with a minimum of relearning.

If you're not quite sure yet what a relational database is or why someone would use one, check out our guide to database terminology. Otherwise, let's dive into some books for beginners, and one for experienced database developers.

jQuery is a JavaScript library designed to make designers and front-end developers' lives easier. According to W3Techs, jQuery is the most popular JavaScript library by far, and is in use by 33.1% of all websites.

If you're a designer or front-end developer, it's definitely something worth knowing. Here are some resources to help you learn and master jQuery.

Scala is one of the hottest new programming languages of the past few years. It's in use at companies like Foursquare and Twitter, and The Guardian is working on porting some of its Java code to Scala. Here are a few books and tutorials to get you started.

We've said it before: Java isn't dying - it's mutating. In addition to the Java Virtual Machine's use in languages like Scala, Java is used with Apache Cassandra, Apache Hadoop, Neo4j and other cutting edge data tools. It's also the language used for building native apps for Android, which has become the most popular smart phone OS on the market. Yes, The Guardian is swapping out Java for Scala. But Twitter, which once pioneered the production use of Ruby on Rails and Scala, now uses Java for its entire search stack.

In other words, it's still worth learning Java. Here are three books for beginning programmers.

The Node Beginner Book by by Manuel Kiessling is a new Node.js e-book. It's only about 40% done, and is actually more of a long tutorial than a book at this point.

Kiessling's work is aimed for developers "experienced with at least one object-oriented language like Ruby, Python, PHP or Java, only little experience with JavaScript, and completely new to node.js."