What are the first steps to learn computer programming?

I would like to work with artificial intelligence later in my life. I'll start computer science next year at a university and I would like to learn some basics during these months that I have.





What should I learn? I'm 20 years old and I've been around computers since I was a kid and I'm more than just an average user, however my programming knowledge is none.

What are the first steps to learn computer programming?
Get a book like Teach Yourself C++ in 21 Days by Jesse Liberty, and go through it. It will help a lot in college. I would suggest C,C++ or Java.
Reply:I suggest that the first thing is have fun by writing many short simple programs e.g. Produce a table of conversions of dollar to Euros.
Reply:Visual Basic, Java, and C# are all good languages for beginners that are fun object-oriented languages will teach you the basics.
Reply:I would start out with visual basic, it's pretty good for beginners. PHP is also easy to learn. Learning one programming language will make learning others easier, it's a lot of problem-solving skills.
Reply:I myself learned by the famous QBasic! My first program was: Play "abcdef" which played notes thru the internal speaker in the computer. After getting the basics down in QBasic I moved to Visual Basic.