>Stay away from tutorials. Try to get some books on subjects that interest you, and try to get good books.
Strongly agreed. In particular, the "tutorials" which are just "copy this code into the editor, do this, do that, and it'll work"; if the author doesn't know exactly what he/she is writing about, then it becomes a case of the blind leading the blind.
I'll start off by saying that computer programming has a VERY large body of theoretical knowledge that goes with it; unless you want to just "learn programming" and become an ad-hoc code monkey, you WILL have to learn the theory, and this entails a not so trivial amount of mathematics (especially working with integers). If math is not a strong point for you, programming will likely not be one either.
As for the actual material, I recommend a mix of both theory and practice for the beginner; the two textbooks for my introductory programming courses are K&R and SICP. The former for learning the C language itself, and the latter for the theoretical principles.
Another area that should definitely be studied but perhaps with less intensity is the low-level stuff -- CPU, memory, boolean logic, Asm, etc. For this, it's sufficient to understand only the basics how a computer works, so grab e.g. a Z80 or the Intel CPU manuals and give them a quick read.
In addition, don't be tempted to go with whatever fad language seems to be popular these days; once you grasp the theory (via SICP) and the general semantics of procedural languages, any other procedural language should be easily learned -- providing that you have been educated in the right manner; tying concepts to syntax will almost certainly be a pitfall of this, as instead of understanding e.g. the way a loop works, one memorises the syntax of a loop, unable to adapt to a slightly different syntax of another language.
>>34
Err... I can only think of one phrase to describe that: WTF?
OP, go read SICP and K&R (both can be found on the Internet, the latter a little more difficult to locate but it's a PDF). If you are interested in what you see, then you'll enjoy learning programming. Otherwise, you'll probably get to hate it.