What You Need

In order to make your own programs, you need at minimum, a compiler. There are some open source ones but starting a couple years ago, Microsoft started releasing free versions of their Visual Studio IDE (Integrated Development Environment). In order to download the IDEs, you just need to go here. I suggest download the C++ and C# version, ah heck. Get them all. Then, I want you to get a java IDE, my favorite is NetBeans, click here. You can start with the small version but if you have broadband and space to spare, just get the main one so that you can explore more. Well, that about sums it up for now, in the future if you want to do some Database programming get MySQL. Apache (included w/ the biggest version of NetBeans) is a webserver in case you want to do some web programming. Oh yeah, see if you can get a copy of Flash MX,8 or higher. We will probably delve into some ActionScript and Flash programming at some time. My favorite scripting language is Python, I promise we'll do some of that at some point. Let me know if there is something special that you want to do. I'll tell you what you need to accomplish it.