Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years http://www.norvig.com/21-days.html I could not agree more. The only place I would write differently is, learn by doing. I would modify that with, learn by doing, then learn theory, then go back throw out what you wrote and rewrite, learn more theory, wash rinse repeat. Some would say, don't throw out, refactor instead. Maybe...
Ya this is very true. I didn't pick up programming right away on the first try myself. I felt boxed in by most languages... their learning curves are so steep. I'm dabbling in python and thinking about ruby as well. It seems foolish to commit a huge amount of time to a language unless you're absolutely certain the applications you want to develop will be needed after you've learned the programming language well enough. There are so many new tools and programs its hard to keep up on what should be used in a certain situation.
I'm half a year into C++, my first real programming language. I'm leaning on libraries as much as possible. My theory is I don't have to be a master programmer if I use the tools written by people smarter than I am.