There's lots of little mistakes throughout, such as imprecise definitions for compiled/interpreted/VMs and calling DevC++ a compiler, but beginners wouldn't know the difference anyway.
The real problem is that there's just flat-out bad advice! Many of the links he posts are just the first search result you'll find on Google, yet are terrible resources. In particular, cplusplus.com, w3schools, DevC++, and cprogramming.com are things you'll hear experts warn about for being outdated, having misinformation, or just poor explanation.
If you REALLY want to start learn computer programming look at Lisp or Smalltalk.
I really wish I could go back to those times and give the open source world more thought and attention. Free compilers, free databases and looking back at it, PERL would have been a lot more useful than Visual Basic.
I spent years developing OpenGL applications on WindowsNT. I wasn't very good at what I did and the market for my skills wasn't very broad.
Had I built a basic web app using HTML, Postgres and PERL I could have avoided a lot of time spent in jobs I did not enjoy very much.
In the summer of 2002 I was trying to focus on building my skills in C++ and OpenGL to a commercial-ready level. As a fun side project I built a mock airline ticket booking system in PHP. The side project got my a job in Germany and the rest is history.
Some languages and tools are more marketable than others.
Of far more concern than the datedness of it are the grammatical errors; this is a 5 year old blog post, so you'd think he'd have either noticed by now or a reader would have pointed them out (please, programmers— is it really so hard to learn the "its-it's" rule?). Now that's something that could have been done better.
FWIW I think the W3Schools PHP tutorial is one of the best out there. Straight to the point.
Giving students the wrong information (as w3schools frequently does) is worse than giving them no information at all. To say it's "one of the best" implies that the bar is set pretty damn low.
Just go to W3fools http://w3fools.com/ and search for PHP, I'm sure you will be able to find few mistakes or bad programming practices.
The author must be still stuck in the 90s. With mobile app development rapidly reaching its peak, software is a gold mine, and it costs very little to be able to earn some extra cash off of app development.
Also, I didn't like how the author recommended Visual Studio. Visual Studio is a closed-source, slow, resource-heavy piece of software that ONLY works on Windows. Windows is not a very good development platform, and I'm surprised that the article didn't mention any software for BSD or GNU/Linux (Geany?), or any mention about standalone compilers like gcc. He just jumps straight into the IDE portion without properly explaining how to use a compiler.
This is a decent article for anyone wishing to dip their toes into the world of programming, but for beginners, I'd recommend a good Sams Teach Yourself book instead.
Most likely you wouldn't be learning something marketable perse, however you would learn programming in the same time as you do now. Actually I think maybe even more efficient as there weren't the HN post distractions :) Your computer would most likely not be connected (all the time) and multitasking wasn't very nicely implemented or even possible, so your computer meant either running games/software made by others or full focus on tinkering with Basic, assembly or some of the other languages out there at the time.
Lolwut?
Am I about to go to jail for failing to pay my emacs fee?
It's like it's written to not mean much, but get money from ad impressions. I didn't like the post in general, nor the title.
I don't think he makes very good points, except the variable/conditional/etc thing.
