Why do people need programmers?
In this fast paced world, there is an ever increasing rise in the number of startups that are formed each day. Every startup nowadays requires a website as it is now considered as a necessity for any company which deals with people, this leads to more job opportunities in the programming sector. Well if there is lot of demand for programmers, it instantly makes my lazy mind think that there might be enough programmers to code to fulfill this large demand. No, it is estimated that there would be nearly 1.4 Million programming jobs and about four hundred thousand would be able to qualify for this out of college. So there still be 1 Million job opportunities available for you and I don’t think that will be difficult to grab just 1 out of those million jobs. 
The best part is that you can add it to your portfolio or résumé and this skill would separate you from the rest, which means you will get priority over others when you apply for a job as every company needs programmers!.
Not a programmer yet? How can I learn to Code?
The answer to this question is fairly simple and straight forward. Read programming books and practice! I am myself a programmer and have been programming for the past 3-4 years and from my experience I have learnt a lot from reading books and practicing what I read, on the computer. Besides that I would recommend you take some small projects or tasks and try to code them by yourself. This really helps a lot in getting familiar with programming.
Learning to program online is a lot easier nowadays, as we know code is not generally taught in schools and code is becoming more and more intrinsic in our every day lives as we all rely on tools that not many people know how work! With the new online compilers and sites that make learning programming simple and enjoyable. Some of the sites which you might want to check out are:-
3. http://www.dreamincode.net/home/
These sites provide free programming tutorials and would help you to get started.
What if I am stuck learning programming?
I would personally advise you to have lot’s of persistence and patience when you write a program. Everyone gets stuck when they try to program and even the best programmers have bugs and errors in their code when they write a piece of code for first time. Even after programming for the past few years, I recently was coding a plugin for somebody and it took me like 15 hours just to fix one little bug which caused the program to not run as it was expected to! So you really need to have those two qualities to get you to learn to code. Besides that you should not be afraid to ask help. Some of the places where I go when I encounter an issue or don’t know how to fix code are:-
1. http://stackoverflow.com/ – It’s a community of developers willing to help people, and new programmers who face any issue with their code.
2. http://google.com/ – Ya I really Google something which gets me stuck while I code. It is a really big help!
Let’s get to the main point, Income
Earning money from programming is fairly simple. It’s just that the learning part which is a bit tough.
An experienced programmer earns like $50-$70 an hour as a freelancer or $80,000 annually as full time programmer.
So where do I sell my service as a freelance programmer and earn money?
There are many places where you can sell your service, but I’ll give you some of the places which help me in earning a lot of money.
1. http://elance.com - My personal favourite (as a buyer at least)
2. http://odesk.com
4. http://seoclerks.com - Full potential yet to be realized - there is a lot of effort and money going behind this site!
7. http://codecanyon.net - Part of the exponential Envato network of marketplaces.
Conclusion
Finally I would like to tell you that from my experience programming is a enjoyable job. I don’t think anything in world can even compare the satisfaction that you get by creating something new that functions how you told it to! So Happy earning from freelance programming.
Some of the programming languages I would recommend you to learn and are in demand would be:-
1. Ruby on Rails
2. PHP
3. Javascript/Node.js
4. jQuery
5. HTML5, CSS3
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