blazerboy65

I don't have any programmer family members, just one friend. I'm completely self-taught. It was REALLY hard getting started, I mucked around for a few years in a few languages and never really got past conditionals, let alone data structures. In hindsight, making games in Game Maker was really a bad way to learn actual programming or project management. Please don't ask me to look at my old code.

I'm 18 now and trying to thoroughly learn Python with a few books I've downloaded: A Byte of Python, How to Think Like A Computer Scientist: Learning With Python, Learning Python the Hard Way. Please don't judge me, but I actually printed the entirety of that last book into a PDF; I'll get around to legitimately buying it eventually.

I kind of feel like I'm competing against my best friend to see who can make the coolest stuff, although it's getting hard to rate website stuff versus CS/math stuff. I'm also no longer scared to dive into manuals or look at code from other languages.

TL;DR Starting on the path of programming without ANYONE to explain things to you or that your code really does suck is not easy, but doesn't make learning impossible. It's like being thrown into a pool in order to learn to swim.

Valid point.

I might just not understand this site's mission or goal or whatever, but this just doesn't seem hacking-related to me.