how to become a good programmer?

Practice and practice only. That's what makes a man perfect.

Hi Chriscode,

U want 2 become a good programmer. Follow these rules...............

1) Gather complete requirements.

2) Write an implementation plan(model).

3) Add comments to u r code.

4) Use naming conventions for variables.

5) Organize u r code.

6)Test(//Important//).

7)Practice.

8)Be Prepared 4 change.

9)Start Simple & work towards complexity.

& more over........

Strong skill of one of one or more languages(pref:C ,C++,Java,PHP)
Know most common algorithms well,
Be skilled in debugging in IDE's...........

Try...........

Goodluck...............
Regards,
Riju

You should be logical , programmer should have all kind of knowledge e.g Technology, understand the problem, he should be analytical and logical and he should know how to merge the technology into problem ( here comes experience and practice ) and get answer.

I think the difficult part, is wanting to learn everything at once. This can include:

Good programming practices
Programming Theory
OOP
Languages (in general)
etc.
I like you, have not been formally trained. In order to learn good practices as well as theory, one depends on some excellent books, classes, and sometimes co-workers (depending on who they are). All in all, it takes time and lots of patience. Programming isn't one of those things that one can do well without practice, time and like I said before patience (for all those times that it takes hours to debug or figure out a trival problem). You may want to read 'The Pragmatic Programmer' and 'Code Complete' before or at the same time as reading 'Programming Perl.' This will give you a chance to learn some good practices as well as having the opportunity to actually put those practices in motion. What may be a better idea than doing the exercises in the book or books is to find a clear goal/task that you would like to meet and code that. It's great practice, as well as accomplishing a goal/task. I had a difficult time with Perl and doing the exercises - it wasn't until I had to actually create a program for work - that I was able to really understand some of the concepts and ideas that I had read. Good luck and remember: we were all once there.