Quote from: Barnacle_Ed on June 25, 2013, 07:54:33 PM

Quote from: darkproton on June 25, 2013, 06:50:27 PM

Frame of mind is crucial. Ok, I will give you a second to get psyched....ready? Here we go. It can be intimidating not being a programmer but this is a wonderful place to start. Programming with an interest, such as api calls in Python, can really expound horizons. So to get started, first get an ide. This is a program that you will code in. I would say get Eclipse, others may disagree. http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/packages/eclipse-classic-422/junosr2 It's free. Next get python.
http://www.python.org/getit/windows/Install Python. Get 2.7 or >. Check out beginners section http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide. Now get pydev so that eclipse can utilize python http://pydev.org/manual_101_install.html. It's a little bit of a setup but I think its worth it. Maybe someone else here has better ideas!

These are some good starting recommendations.

At the risk of turning this into a text-editor-based religious war: I'd personally recommend avoiding IDEs since I find them slow, clunky, and fairly unnecessary for Python. Sublime Text and the command prompt is enough to get started after downloading the necessary Python packages.

One other venue to check out for aspiring coders is CodeAcademy, which walks you through programming examples online...all you need is a browser.

+1
My way is a little overkill