With a surprising amount of interest in gotoel's learning to code site at Codecademy, I thought I'd offer an alternative for people that may be a bit more serious or dedicated to getting into programming/scripting/coding etc.

Why you should be interested:
•It's free
•It changes pace in a logical order. Those that tried Codecademy probably got semi-frustrated going from variable declarations to booleans etc. with any semblance of order.
•It governs a more powerful language than Javascript, so you won't have to ditch it for a new language once you figure out the basics if you don't want to.

Why Python?
Well, you can do just about anything you want. Want to write code and have it interact with Java? Try Jython. Want to make a game? Try pygame. Want to do something with the .NET Framework? There's IronPython for that. It even has a decent math module in its standard library that you can do all sorts of interesting things with.

Without further adieu, let me introduce Learn Python the Hard Way.

What you will need:
•Python 2.7.2*
•Gedit
•Windows PowerShell**

For Mac users, use Terminal. For Linux users though I doubt we have any here, you're probably already familiar enough with bash to begin.

A notepad or something like Anki is incredibly useful since you will need to memorize a LOT!

*The guide uses Python 2 instead of 3 because nearly every program still exists in 2. The syntax (what you type in to make stuff happen) is slightly different in 3, so a lot of code may be incompatible.
** Only needed for Windows users, and Windows 7 usually comes with it. You can check if you have it by either searching powershell, or press Windows + R and typing powershell.

But Why Would I Want to Learn the HARD Way?
This is covered in the first section, but it is the more traditional (and basically better) way of teaching. Most things that require to be memorized to some extent have alternate ways of teaching, but it really is the best for new programmers to at least memorize the basics, which is why this is better. Sure, you can always look up syntax, but how fast do you think you'll make something if you have to look up every method and formatting type?

Have fun, and if you need help, add me

I've only been using it for a while, but I've also learned a bit from a book so I could probably help with the basics.

P.S The formatting on this site sucks. No, size 3 for one word does not mean size 3 for the entire thing!