Could anyone suggest books about programming

[EnderWiggin]

I'm looking for just a tiny bit of 'mentoring (if my time in corporate america hadn't made that word so unpleasant),' and many people here seem very helpful, I wondered if someone might point me in the right direction. I realize the best way to progress is just to write code, but due to some health problems I can't spend very long sitting up at a time. But I have an ebook reader and I can get text files pretty quickly and study that way.

I'd tried to learn to program a few times in the past but it always felt so abstract, like I was coming up with a really hard way to do something really easy. Autoit has been a revelation to me. I'm still only about a week into learning about it, but I'm immediately able to do the reverse: easily accomplish something that would have been very hard.

I found that quite inspiring so I read the ebook on the forum, "The Autoit Quickguide," and found the other book suggested on the main page and read it too (The Windows Admin Scripting Little Black Book). I've copied a lot of code examples, such as the ones put together by valuater for his tutorial sequence and the ones on the script excerpt site; so I try to make sense of those. And I've studied what I could find about arrays and regular expressions, since both of those seemed very useful. But it's all been very ad hoc.

I'm eager to become better at manipulating text (since I am always trying to download internet pages and put them in text files so I can read them while lying down). I'm also interested in learning about how networks work; I read the links in Dale's sig on TCP, which were very interesting. I'd like to be able to manipulate a browser well through scripts and manage files through scripts, since I do those things a lot. And I'm hoping to learn some way to send the text I generate with Dragon Naturally Speaking (a voice to text program) to a non-active window. But I'm also eager to become a 'good programmer' to the extent that's possible without being able to go to school for it, so I don't want to skip important topics, as I opportunistically learn about the ones that seem relevant now.

If anyone could suggest reading materials suitable for a novice, and ideally not super abstract, I'd appreciate it more than you know. Really appreciate the community you guys have built here and the program itself.

Edited June 23, 2010 by EnderWiggin

[Bert]

http://www.w3schools.com/default.asp

Easy to learn, great examples, and will greatly expand your knowledge. Feel free to PM me if you like to chat about learning other stuff. I may be able to help.

-V

[EnderWiggin]

Really cool site. I need to figure out to write an autoit script that will allow me to read the site on my ebook reader. But it does look exactly like the kind of thing I need. It's great how when I pick a topic, it tells me other concepts I should confirm I know first, and then gives me links to those topics. Thanks very much for this.