What's the best way to start learning programming language design?

The best way to prepare to design something new is to learn about previous work in the field. There are literally hundreds of programming languages, thousands if you include "little languages". A few dozen of these had something new to say when they were created. Learn about those languages. Especially read the initial papers about them where their designers talked about what they were trying to achieve. You don't need to agree with all of their objectives, nor with their own assessment of success (I often don't), but you need to understand what they are saying. Once you have done the above, you are ready to start thinking about language design in a fundamental way, not merely "syntactic sugar".

I'm an advocate for whatever method you know works best for you. Before paying for any sort of curriculum, or college credit, look into different FREE guides to programming. There are quite a few out there for Java/C++ programming, and other languages too. There are even programming guides and aids aimed for the middle school age group!

I'll just tell you what i have done...If you have ample of time (i began in class 8, am currently in class 11) you can follow the following sequence: First you can learn QBASIC. It is  a very basic language and builds a nice base for learning how a program works. I learnt it from http://tedfelix.com/qbasic/. Learn as much as you want. Skip the chapters about graphics and sound as they are not useful. Don't expect yourself to do something great from QBASIC as it is obselete and is just good for being introduced to programming. Then you can start on with C++ no need to learn C. You can learn C++ from   books. I learned it from Programming Principles and Practice using c++ by Bjarne Stroustrup. Then you could learn more from Lippman's C++ primer. C++ is a very good and useful language after learning it well. You can easily pick up with some more advanced languages like Python, Java, etc. that are built mostly on C++. Most of the computer systems are built on C++. After all, programming is more about logical thinking. The above are just languages and just provide a way to communicate with the computer and tell it what to do and how to do. But, you need to be able to explain things to computer in an algorithmic manner using any language. And gradually you would learn that computer is the "dumbest" thing you ever encounter.This might not be the best way but it worked for me and I can program pretty well.Hop this helps!!

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