Software help

Andy,

  You can learn programming by taking a class, (including online classes

from MIT, Stanford, etc), or by reading a book, or by following web tutorials. 

It helps to have a goal, such as making games, or making an interactive

web site, or doing something mathematical such as computing pi to

trillions of places, or controlling some robot or home appliances, etc. 

There are lots of programming languages to choose from, and which

is best depends on what you want to do.

Project Euler has some has interesting mathematically oriented problems

to solve:

http://projecteuler.net/

The website http://ideone.com lets you try out a huge selection of different

languages from your browser.

The website http://rosettacode.org does a good job of comparing

programs written in different programming languages.

Learning programming is probably best done from a PC, where you can

install a modern development environment, such as Eclipse, and you

don't have to worry about compilation taking a long time, or running out

of memory, and where you can have multiple browser tabs open to

documentation while you are programming.

Google will find you lots of resources for beginning python or whatever, such as:

http://cs.simpson.edu/cmsc150/

http://learnpythonthehardway.org/

http://www.itmaybeahack.com/homepage/books/python.html

There is also some wisdom here:

http://norvig.com/21-days.html

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/cs.html

Andy,

  You can learn programming by taking a class, (including online classes

from MIT, Stanford, etc), or by reading a book, or by following web tutorials. 

It helps to have a goal, such as making games, or making an interactive

web site, or doing something mathematical such as computing pi to

trillions of places, or controlling some robot or home appliances, etc. 

There are lots of programming languages to choose from, and which

is best depends on what you want to do.

Project Euler has some has interesting mathematically oriented problems

to solve:

http://projecteuler.net/

The website http://ideone.com lets you try out a huge selection of different

languages from your browser.

The website http://rosettacode.org does a good job of comparing

programs written in different programming languages.

Learning programming is probably best done from a PC, where you can

install a modern development environment, such as Eclipse, and you

don't have to worry about compilation taking a long time, or running out

of memory, and where you can have multiple browser tabs open to

documentation while you are programming.

Google will find you lots of resources for beginning python or whatever, such as:

http://cs.simpson.edu/cmsc150/

http://learnpythonthehardway.org/

http://www.itmaybeahack.com/homepage/books/python.html

There is also some wisdom here:

http://norvig.com/21-days.html

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/cs.html

Thanks for that - i'll have a think about what i want to achieve and then go from there. All the best

I found a really useful page at http://elinux.org/RPi_Programming_Books which i thought i'd share. It refers to 4 downloadable Python related programming books which seems consistent with the recommended default R-Pi set up using Debian . Easy to use and really accessible for a newbie like me