I'm 20 and have been programming for a few years now, nothing really serious but, a few unfinished projects that I took as far as my attention span would allow. I'm currently working on getting as feature-rich of a client server setup as I can up and running to remake some games (checkers, tic tac toe, rock paper scissors) to run over a network. (no one tell Matthew Broderick!)

Really, learning to program is not much different from learning anything else, it'll take time, patience, and practice but eventually you will get there and along the way you'll have a ton of way satisfying moments where you go, "Oh I get it now!" that are excellent rewards for time and headaches spent.

I started toying with computers when i was six on my moms dos machine.
The monitor was greyscale and there was no mouse, just text on a black screen.
She showed me how to use the basic dos commands to get around the system and find some of the games i liked to play, and get them running.
These were text based rpg games with no graphics, (and it still was fun).
Ahh.. the good old days...
Now im 32 years old and still cant walk away from this thing.
I guess its a sign of accomplishment to make your computer do stuff.
The learning curve of programming for me has never stopped, there is always something new to learn, and nobody can learn it all.
An old man once told me that experience is cheap when it is second hand.
What he meant is to learn from other peoples accomplishments and mistakes,
then use your own judgement in the situation at hand.
These days im into graphics programming and OS design.
I would say that building a game engine does not take nearly as much time as preparing all the stuff for the game, like models, textures, etc...
Ok, enough blabbering for now.
So welcome to forum and may you type a plethora of code for the world to use...

Quote:Original post by rosshildick
im only 19, surely thats not too late to start from almost scratch?

Definately not, I started when I was 20!