Becoming a good programmer is just the art of practice and experiments. When we start our journey in programming, we face with lot of programming languages that exists. One thing is common in the new programmers that they choose the programming language which they have learned in their academic studies. But remember that you have your future life that has relation with what you choose.
I have seen many people choosing a programming language in their early life which is not so much popular. The result is that the programming language which they learn no more exists in near future. So your goal will be to choose a language which most of developers are using. You can get an idea of which programming language is most popular and why the people are pretending to choose that language. I know that java was very popular in early days when I come into existence. But now Sun Company has sold out java and now java is owned by oracle. Java is mostly used in developing android apps nowadays. And java EE is near to deprecate.
You have to first decide that whether you want to develop a web application or desktop application. This will give you a path to decide where you have to go. The important thing is that you have to first understand logic of programming. All the programming languages work in the same logic. For example, every programming language has conditional statements, functions, inheritance. You have to first study the basic theory of how a programming language work.
It is not good to experiment all the languages and at the end you are jack of all languages and master of none. Choose one language and experiment with it so that you can do anything using that language. You can get a good job if you know one language. If you choose many languages then at the end you will get nothing in your hand. Whenever you decided to choose a language then first start with a simple editor to use while working in a language. For example at the beginning use notepad or notepad++. If you are using mac then textpad is good to get started.
There are many sites on internet from which you can learn the basics of programming language. But the best way is to download a book for that programming language and start learning. During the time of learning book, always do practice. If you read all the book without doing practicing the code then you know nothing. You will forget all the code you learned if you don’t practice it by your hands. Make a demo project of all the things you learned. Use all the functions in your demo project. This will help you to memories the functions of that programming language.
No programmer in the world knows all the functions of the programming language. You have to just remember important functions of language and keep note of other functions and use it when required. An expert programmer is that which do practice and work on real time projects. Programming language is a thing that if you work then you are master and if you don’t work then you don’t know anything.