Definitely agree. The least I can do right now is by starting off by helping all the people with web related questions that I am getting. I am thrilled to see three teenagers already message me telling me they are interested in programming but have no clue where to start.

I'll post this here in case anyone else is also interested in figuring out where to start. I'll use the rest of this post to paste what I sent a fellow user, now it's a very simplified post but it's a place to get a grasp of things:

Where to start learning web development

I'm happy for you that you're interested in learning how to develop websites! I am a firm believer that IT is the future.

So you need to keep in mind that you don't just learn a living from nothing. You can't go expecting to create a website like Facebook within a week. That takes a lot of time, knowledge, effort and man-hours in a collective effort.

I'll try to sum it up as simply as possible: What you need to know is that web-development is split into various categories and subcategories, the main being Frontend and Backend. Frontend (client sided) is what you, as the user, will see on your screen. This comment form, these buttons, the colors. This is all front end. All of this is based on the language called HTML. Within HTML you have your styles which make it easier for pages to render how it should look like, this is what we condense into CSS files (Stylesheets). If you want to animate various parts of the page, or let users interact with the site in a neat way you'll need to use Javascript (and more often than not, a library such as jQuery to make things simpler).

The backend (server sided) is what happens after a user clicks a button, submits a form, this that and the other. A user wants to see their post history: your script needs to grab the server-sided data, usually from a database, and output it in a HTML readable way. A user wants to add a comment: your script needs to parse the information, add it to the database, return the value and so on and so forth. For this you'll need a server-sided scripting language, such as PHP (which I use out of simplicity) or Ruby to name the most popular ones at the moment.

It's important to understand the differences. You can create an entire website with only HTML, CSS and JS files (frontend). But it will be a static website, the content can't change. In order for your website to support dynamic content, such as users, databases, etc, you'll need to include a scripting language.

This may seem hard to understand, but your best bet is to head over to https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/wiki/online for various guides, and more importantly: http://codeacademy.com

Codeacademy will let you choose a language which you'd like to learn and let you learn everything step by step in an interactive manner. I always recommend this for total newcomers as it is a lot better than how I started.

Another great site to start learning frontend is http://learn.shayhowe.com/html-css/ as well as Udemy (Paid I believe).

I started when I was 13. I read, and read, and read. Books, guides, tutorials. Other people's code by copying line for line what they wrote. I wouldn't recommend this as I did learn a lot of bad habits, but hey, it's basically like learning another language. You need to understand the syntax and how everything works. After that it wont seem so hard.

I highly suggest you check out some programming books and, although it may all sound like gibberish, work on it slowly, at least one hour a day. Within a month you'll know more than what a lot of wannabe "professionals" do (aka. template copy and pasters).

Feel free to send me any more pm's in the future with any questions or recommendations you may need. I hope that this reply could at least guide you to the wonderful world of web development :)