You can point them to a book, a website, an online course, a screencast series, etc. The novice has no preference for a particular language or platform.<p>What would you recommend and why?
I would recommend my product: <a href="http://protocademy.com" rel="nofollow">http://protocademy.com</a><p>Its a program focused on teaching you how to program to a level where you can get a job doing so. It focuses on having you prototype and build many types of applications with different languages. You also learn to work with the whole stack (as in learn to deploy those apps that you write).<p>I developed the program after teaching people how to program (online and offline) for a while. I realized that people usually have three main issues when learning how to program:<p>- They dont know how to learn how to program.<p>- They dont know how to find answers to their questions/doubts.and the<p>- They don't understand how programs work in general (breaking down instructions into simple steps).<p>So, with that in mind, I created the program. Its been getting good results.
At the risk of this coming across as a 'one up the rest' post with something so open-ended, <a href="http://www.class-central.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.class-central.com/</a> would be my choice. They aggregate MOOCs from the top providers, with a search capability.
www.markmyplace.com - I wrote this as an exercise to teach myself how to build an application from start to finish. This is the third iteration, and while a bit crude, it contains all of the resources I have found while learning programming and related topics. It also has a good deal of the random things in it that interest me. If it is related to programming and was useful to me in some way it is probably in there. Hit the tags and find some stuff. Any suggestions to improve it would be great too.
Udacity.com - Design of Computer Programs, Web Applications Engineering, Social Network Analysis (algorithms), and many more<p>Coursera.com - too many courses to list.
codeeval.com - projecteuler.net - rosalind.info - develop a habit of solving problems, and you'll become a better programmer in no time. Try to use your programming languages idiomatically. You may also want to review your solutions once in a while as your skills improve.
unquestionably, <a href="http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/" rel="nofollow">http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/</a>. It starts from the very beginning and takes you step by step.