Learning how to program... but what's the best way?

[Matt Gerrans]

A few posts down, there are some implementions of the 8 queens problem;
maybe try to solve this manually on a chessboard for a while (to get an idea
of the difficulty and also because it is kind of a fun puzzle), then show
the program.   A similar problem is the knight's tour, which is where you
start with a knight and hop around the board (as knight's do), landing once
and only once on each square.