How do I get started in programming.

Go to codeacademy.com learn java or some other common language. Then go to fiverr or some website like that and start taking up projects. Don't expect to get paid a lot for your beginning work. Or even your middle tier.

>>17984514
Currently I just wanna learn. Codeacademy sound interesting though, thanks a lot!

>>17984508

play with javascript, it is freebie available on windows computers

All these indians telling you to learn some codemonkey language.
Nope. First you got to realize that IT is a huge field by now, and there are a lot of different areas, some of which you may like more than others.
Here are some of the things you can learn: theory, webdev, low-level, system administration, network administration, networking applications, system programming, low-level graphics programming, gamedev, embedded systems, reverse engineering and binary hacking....
So you first have to think what it is that interests you more, and then pick a language. It shouldn't be hard at that point, and the language you choose to learn will be in your domain of interest. Lots of people do something like learn C when they don't care about low-level stuff and just want to do frontend applications, I myself started with java but soon realized I am far more interested in the low level kind of things. Later I went for lisp because "Teh powarful alien language" but it never clicked and then I found Forth which is more keen to my way of thinking.
hackerrank is also a good resource for practicing
I've heard of others, though I haven't tried them, from what I've heard I think it's better to avoid: khanacademy and "Learn X the hard way".

Once you pick a language, read a book on that language and do the excercises.

>>17984508
The most important thing is to choose a book that uses an indentation style that is logical for you to read.

I learned from a book on C algorithms back in the day, probably out of print decades ago. And the indentation it used stuck. There is no reason to learn, as your first language, a language that requires you to manually allocate memory. On the other hand the complexities of objects are not simple to grasp either. Whatever you choose have fun debugging. It is one of the most pleasurable activities one can do.

>>17985122
>mfw reverse engineer
>telling an absolute beginner he should do reverse engineering or network programming

Holy fucking shit.
Your whole post reeks of quirky nu-male "look at me, I'm programming genius".

OP, my suggestion: tabula rasa. Don't look at anything IT related until the course starts, and go into it hardcore then, in the right environment with professors who can teach and good excercises to solve.

Also (why nobody talks of this, I don't know): look for good peers to study with.

>>17986039
This really.
Most self taught programmers start for a reason, out of a genuine curiosity for solving a problem or a desire to make something. You already have a general interest but I guess it hasn't been 'contextualised' - your course should provide this and allow you to see what kind of problems can be solved.
You don't need to think about specialising or going a certain route because that will come naturally after a while as you're exposed first hand to programming's varied and numerous domains.

>>17984508
Not OP
also I don't want to make this into a language war, but, I have background in mathematics and physics and the only programming course I took was intro C in first year. I can use Matlab and Mathematica comfortably, but these are mainly for building prototypes and algebraic models for research, also Python is nice but they are interpretive, hence slow when dealing with massive data set (? this is what I'm told)
Would C# or C++ be more suitable for practical implementation? which is fastest and most convenient? what about Java? why are these three so popular? or am I wrong?

start with Haskell

>>17987237
Why do you want to deal with massive datasets? Are they so massive indeed that python is a bad choice? Is performance really that critical for you?
Because python may still be the best choice. Poster above suggested haskell, I don't know how efficient (in time) it is, but since it's compiled it's probably a good alternative.
C++ is a pain to write, and Java is plain shit and probably just marginally more efficient than python.
They're popular because of Object Orientation, which is not a very good way to program, and it's a very specific-purpose solution that for some reason is used as a general purpose one.
Oh, if you want to do statistics programming, go for R