When you first start out playing guitar you probably want to learn to play as fast as you can and you might get tired of progressing so slowly. Don't give up if you're not motivated though.

Learning to play guitar is easy (to a certain degree), but it's getting over the mental blocks thats the hard part. Without someone helping you along the way this is extremely hard to get over at times and I always recommend that people get guitar lessons.

When I went for lessons for the first time I made more progress in the first 3 months than I did in the whole year before that. I could never use all my fingers while playing guitar, but two weeks after my first lesson it was almost like second nature to use them all.

The difference was that when I tried to learn by myself I didn't have any direction. Having a guitar teacher, and books gave me a certain path to follow so that I could progress in the best way possible.

Your teacher knows what to look out for and can show you, but on your own you might not notice. It's not impossible to learn on your own though, and there are a lot of free online resources that teach you. You just need to dig through the junk and find the useful info.

Get guitar lessons, it's the fastest way of becoming a good player.

If you feel like trying to learn by yourself though here's what I would recommend:

-Learn to read guitar tabs, these show you the exact notes to play for just about any song.

-Get a few warm-up exercises and use all your fingers from your index to your pinky when you do them.

-Learn to play power chords, A, D, E, C and G. These are the most common chords, you should learn more but these are easy enough to get you used to playing chords.

These are fundamentals to get you started. They should get you far enough to know what you need to look for next.

To make sure that you have a well rounded playing schedule you should try to have a bit of everything.

Here's my schedule that I used when I started out:

-15 minute warmup to get blood flowing in your hands and to loosen up those fingers. Also use this time to learn new scales, they should be integrated in your warm-up.

-15 minutes playing songs using chords and learning new chords if needed.

-30 minutes learning to play something new (not using chords, but learning a rock song. Generally just learn to play something you like)

After this just play whatever you want, whether its a new song you just learned to play or if its something old, just have fun.

The most important part of playing guitar is to remember why you are doing it. Have fun and make a noise, don't get too serious if something goes wrong, you can always improve and keep going.

Never forget why you started playing and you'll never want to stop.