I've recently become laid off and in search of a new career. The government I live under provides funding for college to upgrade my skills. I've always wanted to program but never had funding to go to school for it.

Anyways, school will not start for me soon. I might make the January start date but not certain. I don't want to wait until then to start either.

One of my goals is to help out with open source projects during my schooling.

I have very limited programming experience. I've modified some QBASIC games back in my DOS games (Changed some text strings for fun, thats about it.)

Basicly:

I want to start programming for the KDE Desktop. I have plenty of time on my hands (no job, government is paying me to do nothing atm).

Are there recommendations for the zero day programmer? (What books are awesome to check out, hints, or guides). I am willing to learn and read anything suggested my way. I also get distracted easily, so any suggestions in that department are welcomed too!

I've tried to do some of my own research but can't find a solid answer for beginner programming. I did pick up a c++ book (Sams Teach yourself C++ in 21 days).

PS: some of what I ask can be found, however I was looking for the opinion of open source developers and kde developers. the stuff online I read is usually microsoft-centric.

I'm not a developer, but you might want to check out my The Road to KDE Devland series.

First thing I noticed upon entering that site is that the person had the same book I was starting off with

Yes, those posts inspired me to blog this too: http://lahsiv.net/blog/?p=42

To understand things like procedural and objectoriented programming and the Qt-/KDE-API you could learn Ruby. Ruby is a very simple and consistent language. When you will have understood Ruby you will understand a lot of C++-structures and you'll already know the Qt-/KDE-API. But of course you can also develop KDE-applications and KDE-extensions in Ruby.

The User