Computer Classes?

[Prometheus]

I like computers, and would love to know my way around them (one of my dreams in elementary school was to be a hacker), but I don't. In fact, I'm completely clueless. About the most complex thing I can do is change my settings or delete history of this site. There used to be a computer class at my school, but budget cuts got rid of that, and there are none that I can find in my area. If anyone could point me in the direction of a good online class or tutorial or something like that, it would be greatly appreciated.

[paradox]

Well, I'd like to point you towards online tutorial, but you're gonna need to be more specific. Computers has a large variety of specialites you can dive into. It would be helpful if you told us what you want more specifically than the wide range of computers. I saw you mentioned hacking, so if you want to learn hacking, I'd suggest...

http://www.hackthissite.org/pages/index/index.php

It's a nice place that allows you to build up your hacking abilities. You may want to learn HTML first though (Hyper Text Markup Language). It's a common language used to make websites. Here's a tutorial for HTML

http://www.w3schools.com/html/

Also, if you want you may want to download and IDE of your choice.

[Prometheus]

A specialty would be hacking. Being able to take a site and change it. I'll stick with that for now. Something else, I'll be doing this from a Macbook Pro, running the Mac OS-X system. I don't know if that makes any difference, I just know its a better and faster system than Windows. Thanks for the links, too. I've been looking through the one for the html, its very interesting.

[paradox]

Okay, then obiousley you want to go with hacking. Though as you should know, hacking websites is considered illegal so unless you have certain permission from the owners of the websites or any further things you want to do, there is the possiblity of legal action to take place. So just be careful and don't be stupid . And yes, HTML is a very interesting language. It was the first language I ever learned. But now I'm into Java more.

[RobbieThe1st]

*sigh*. Most people have no clue what the word "hacker" means anymore: A hacker is someone who just likes to tinker or hack on things. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_%28 ... culture%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_%28hobbyist%29
The way you hear it used on the media is wrong - They should be using "cracker".

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Anyway, as far as learning things, I've always been a fan of the "learn the tool for the job you want done" approach: Find yourself a problem you want to solve, then figure out what you need to learn to solve it, learn/figure that out, and do it. Then go onto the next problem.
For me, I started out with HTML when I was like 10 or so - I wanted a clean way of displaying Garfield comics I'd downloaded at the library. So, I looked through a tutorial book and figured out what I needed: Basic page structure, Links and Images. Put it all together, and I had something that -worked-.

For you, who knows. Figure out something simple you want to do, and then we can find an appropriate language(Basically, Python or JS+html depending) to do it in, then find some tutorials and get to work.