How to become computer proficient

[dcan]

Books: "Teach Yourself ______ In 24 Hours", "______ for Dummies", etc.

Those are good for PC maintenance, Windows, and the Microsoft Office suite. No substitute for practice though, but they give you the basics you need to be able to actually practice on your own without being lost.

For programming... not so much. While an intro to VB.NET can give you the basics, there's so much more to programming than individual technique, just as teaching you how to dip a brush into paint and drag it across a canvas doesn't make you a painter. You still have to paint. But sometimes the paint doesn't cooperate, and you begin stabbing holes into it and have to throw the canvas out the window. banghead

This metaphor really broke down, sorry :willynilly:

Peter Norvig explains it far better than I can in his fabulous essay Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years. Don't worry, he gives great resources to start learning "real" programming.

That said, a book like "Teach Yourself VB.NET in 24 Hours" can be a good intro to the language and framework. Just remember you will have to learn far more than that to actually build things more complex and useful than what you build in the book. But learning those things is what makes it fun.