What is a good programming community?

StackOverflow is a definite, as noted above. I'll also suggest "Meetup.com" and "Open source".

I'm a big fan of Meetup.com. These are typically open meetings with an interesting speakers, possibly pizza, and definitely the chance to chat in person with interesting people worth knowing.

A search on meetup.com for "Software" in your area shows "Gulf Coast Software Testers", http://www.meetup.com/gulfcoasttesters/. And if there's any group that can help you learn about good dev, its testers.

If you find any open source project that interests you, there are likely many ways to contribute to the code, docs, issues list, release, testing, etc. that will build the project, your skills, your network and your rep.

Seconding another answer above, contributing is the best way to be part of the community and pretty much every OSS project has ways to contribute: http://blog.smartbear.com/programming/14-ways-to-contribute-to-open-source-without-being-a-programming-genius-or-a-rock-star/

Short answer: join GitHub and learn how to create software tests and pull requests, and you'll be welcome in many projects with increasing chances to contribute and build your skills.

Unlike Meetup.com which are in person, OSS communities tend to be virtual.

Hi Earl,

StackOverflow (http://stackoverflow.com/) is a great place to ask programming-specific questions and get answers.

Rui

A community is the place where people feel that they belong, fit in, are cared for, and a place where they feel important. A community with computers could and would be several choices for you to ponder.

Communities are groups of individuals helping one another either by remote desktop or that are directly in the same arena or venue. Since we are a cyber world remote sharing and desktop are becoming part of the community and sharing as part of the computer norm. Such as communications of email blogs etc. :

• Participation in some common practices together depend on one another make good decisions together as a community. A community relies on teams to help one another. If you are seeking a community of programmers I would suggest going into computer sciences and find your niche with computer science. Have you figured out what you want to do with computers yet? What type of computations that interest you could be? Do you want to program? Do you want to do Tech support? Networking? Why or why not are you interested in a community of computer individuals? Do you mean like in gaming? Do you like computer animation? There so many factions for you to choose from where many people such as yourself would be in the same field that you are suggesting in computer sciences. This depends on whom you want to work for? How much college that you want to invest in for the future of your potential career? This sounds like to me you want to work with other people like yourself in the same business? This is an easy task. Computer programmers, and computer admins, computer security are in high demand in our current economy globally. You would not have difficulty landing a job in the field of computer technology of any sorts there are many communities that offer great jobs like google or major computer companies like Facebook too that all sit in front of computers all day and I am very sure they would be happy to help you along. I hope this has helped on your journey into the cyber world. Have you figured out what you want to do yet as far as computers go? Fixing a computer is hardware and some software. Programming is actual code and some mathematics, learning code, writing code. There is Cisco, Java, and so many more programs for you to learn.

This is a hard question to answer, since, as Holly Waggoner(Di'Angelo) says, a community of this sort could mean many different things.

Stackoverflow is a good place. In addition, there are some chat rooms and mailing lists related to learning specific languages. For example, if you go to python.org , you'll notice a "Community" link, which has some further suggestions including an IRC channel.

Also, some Open Source projects have distinct communities around them, united by the common goal of improving the piece of software involved. If you don't know much about Open Source I recommend looking into it, as a programmer in general, and the way to get into one of those communities is to find a project you are interested in and start trying to help out. If you don't know much programming yourself, yet, you can start with improving the documentation (which can mean "writing down what you found was unclear from their instructions").

If you are interested in hanging out with a bunch of local individuals, I recommend checking out www.meetup.com. It is a great way to connect with local communities of various markets. They usually have some great coding programs.

Computer-Science is best where you can learn lot of basics of programming language.