- My friend who has programming knowledge made it sound like coding is extremely difficult, and that I was insulting her by suggesting that I could learn it so easily (i.e., outside of school).
Completely disagree :) I'm a software developer, and have had both formal training and self-taught certain languages. I found it very easy to understand the different concepts of programming. You can get started with just the basics fairly quickly, then it will take time to get experience and broaden your knowledge. As with any skill, the more you practice, the easier it gets. There's an initial hurdle of "Oh crap, this is hard, brain hurting...", you just need to push past that until it becomes familiar. With formal training, you get that hand-holding automatically.
Also depends on what you're programming and language being used, perhaps your friend is working on extremely low level systems, artificial intelligence, graphics or mathematics based applications? But to create a small application that performs some function you need, or a website to display some information - not hard at all.
Pick up any "programming for dummies" book at the library and work your way through, if you have any questions or problems you can Google for solutions - generally someone else has already encountered the problem and has been answered.
If you want to learn a very useful skill in the IT environment, pick up a SQL for beginners book, setup a small database for yourself, and learn how to query a database, write procedures, do updates etc. SQL has some programming concepts as well.
Some useful links :
http://jimmy-li.net/blog/programming/how-to-get-started-in-web-development/ - some good advice
http://www.codecademy.com - Code Academy
https://www.khanacademy.org/ - Khan Academy