I extremely recommend The Little Schemer as a gentle introduction to both programming interactively and to some of the fundamentals of computer science. some of the other books in the series are also good, gentle introductions to some more advanced CS topics too, but they all assume you’ve read through some of this one.

Andrew Plotkin’s Lists and Lists is also pretty good as a self-contained learning environment with a tutorial

other than that, I second the Python recommendation. another first language recommendation I can make is GDScript, the Godot scripting language. it has a very good in-browser interactive tutorial for programming fundamentals, and a very detailed manual once your learning goes beyond what the interactive tutorial teaches. game programming isn’t the easiest way to start in general, but Godot has a few advantages in this area: you can see an interesting result right away when writing code, its scripting language is very well-integrated with its tooling, and it’s fairly close to a couple of other languages in syntax and semantics (specifically Python) so your knowledge should transfer fairly well.

I used this site (forgive me for the very 2000's style branding, very edgy etc) to learn python. the course used to be free on the site, so you will have to find a way around that, either via wallet, or 1337 skills (the course doesn't do the same branding as the site btw). But it also has a useful list of links to books and stuff like that to learn more (or at least give you an idea about how much different things exist out there).

But the idea behind the course 'the best way to learn is to do the work' is pretty useful in learning how to code. It is easy to fall into a trap of reading about some coding and thinking you understand it and then utterly fail at actually implementing it.

But as froztbyte says, it does depend a bit on how you learn.

E: also this url is quite old now, so I have no idea how many of the links still work, sorry about that.

depends on audience / person? and also maybe teacher

I've stepped people through essentials with e.g. idea "tell me how to make coffee" (as an intro to procedurals and dependency) all the way through many other types/shapes, through lego/blockly/whatever style teaching, and through outright "imagine this is a magic box and ${thing} comes out the other side" stepped iteration. sometimes you can jump straight to "hey so here's a language that means specific things and here's what that means" and go from there

so yeah I guess for my part I'd say I attune to the recipient. but for advice toward teacher I guess I'd attune that toward what I figure they'd be good at teaching

so... what're you good at (teaching)?

oh good I needed a replacement free host for my other-other wireguard bouncy box. thanks aws