You know...to see if it contains the reported information?

Figured I'd ask before doing so myself...

I went from knowing absolutely zilch about programming to writing my own Blackberry app. Mind you, I was not in a car accident that affected my memory, but I do have issues with memory for reasons too boring to go into. To make a potentially long story short: Have a project. Mine was having a decent ReadItLater and Tumblr Blackberry app. There weren't any at the time I was using a Blackberry and I didn't want to wait for someone else to charge me for one they wrote.

I cannot emphasize this enough: I did not know *anything* about programming. The *only* way I was able to learn it was the project I wanted to complete.

You have a goal, which is to get back into programming...preferably for gaming platforms. Now you need a project. Something that *you* want to make and use.

What kind of person are you talking about? Regular user? Change-adverse relative? Windows admin? My recommendation would depend on your answer.

I can't speak for the regular user, but as a Windows admin who supports a parent I can speak to the others. If you're dealing with a change-adverse relative (or any other person with a similar temperament, forget it. Maybe if you drop hints for a year or so they may become interested enough to think about a distro.

If you're talking about a Windows admin, just say the following two words and they'll be hooked. Ready?

command history

That's what did it for me. If that fails, throw the RC of Server 2012 at them. If THAT doesn't do it, forget it.

get him to learn the basics - we all have been there and then start getting into the more fun projects like simple games and build on the skills he learns as you go. Programming is hard but it can be very rewarding to see something you built working efficiently... and then making it work better!

To piggyback on this...and roll up a few aforementioned key steps:
1) See if he's got an interest first
1a) See if there's a program he wants that's not available for x platform.
2) Start with what he's interested in
3) Start with something easy in what he's interested in.

I started out with BASIC on an ATARI when I was about six(?)...then dropped programming until about two or three months ago when I got frustrated with the lack of Blackberry apps and decided to write my own instead of waiting for someone to do it for me. I didn't know object-oriented programming, much less Java or JavaME, to save my life (and most would say I probably still don't) but I hit up the Java tutorials and RIM API documentation. It was hard work, and I froze my own Blackberry a number of times, but three/four months later I have a working Blackberry app that wasn't out there before. I can confirm what the quoted poster said...it is very rewarding to see something you wrote work...and use it.

+10 on KeePass. Especially for the following features
1) You can require two forms of auth for viewing the password database
2) Clipboard 10 second restriction (if you copy password to paste into credentials request, password is removed from clipboard in 10 seconds)

I hadn't made a submission in a while and since I was used to the old press-a-button-and-get-submitted-page form, the new method confused me. Thanks for the helpful explanation and the neat new (yeah...it's been that long) logged-in-users comments.

Actually I found a post from someone who was trying to do the same thing and the response to that post mentioned that, while there wasn't a J2ME client library for the GData Blogger API, what would probably be needed for one was pretty simple: an HTTP client, an XML parser and code for handling GData auth.

I found several HTTP clients (one that actually has a sample blog client) and XML parsers and there's sample code for interacting with ClientLogin, Google's installed application auth method. I've also gathered a bunch of articles and reference docs on the interfaces I think I'd need. I was going to open them up and see if I could put something together while reading what's necessary until I saw your post.

I'll back up and start with building something that displays "hello world" first.

Oddly enough, I haven't seen any detailed tutorials on that :-\