This week, December 8-14, 2014 is Computer Science Education Week! Since its inception in 2013, the Hour of Code movement has been gaining steam. During just the CSE Week last year, 15 million students took part.
There have never been more free resources for learning the basics of programming. Code.org, the founders of the Hour of Code, has lots of ways that someone can take part in, or even host an Hour of Code this week.
One resource that I don’t see mentioned on any of these pages, though it is quite good for a free resource, is Codecademy. JavaScript, Ruby, Python, and PHP are just some of the skills that you can begin learning about there.
If you’ve never programmed before, but you’ve wanted to learn, there’s no time like the present to get started!