After you explore data types and variables, take a look at strings, input, testing, and formatting. From there, learn about arguments and parameters, along with conditionals and nested conditionals.

[Stealth] put together a post explaining how he writes drivers for input peripherals. He’s using Python which makes the process fairly painless (we’ll get to that in a minute) but the value of ...

You're taking a new programming class this fall, and you don't know anything about code. Python is taught widely in schools, and it's one of the most loved programming languages because it's simple.