I absolutely agree with the general sentiment in this thread that we're all self-taught. I've had quite a few friends ask me to help them become programmers, a

I absolutely agree with the general sentiment in this thread that we're all self-taught. I've had quite a few friends ask me to help them become programmers, and my first response is that (to paraphrase) "it's not just a job to learn and then work towards retirement. It's a constant learning experience where you have to wake up every day and realize you're ignorant, slow, and unimaginative compared to your peers and if that's not the case, then you're probably going to fall into obscurity. If you're ok with that, then let's get started." One avenue I haven't seen yet approached here is that schooling was far behind the times at least through the mid-90s. I was set to graduate from a highly regarded prep school in 1996, and in the "advanced computer class", we were learning Pascal. My queries about the internet weren't answered well enough to keep me interested in the conversation. By then I'd built a couple silly websites for myself, met hundreds of people from around the world, and had my own little secret educational source - a step up from my peers in school, which I needed because they were all Definitely smarter than me. I was hooked and had zero interest in plain old desktop applications, which was the end-game to what was being taught in every school I looked at (from my 17-year-old perspective). A book on Perl understood what I was after. It wasn't even necessarily a very good book on Perl. It had an open source web-store on a CD in the cover and it told me step-by-step how to find a web host and then set up the web-store on a server. I set up a web store for my mom's retail business, which then stayed afloat for a little while longer (she now sells online full-time). I proceeded to drop out of college and haven't stopped learning since.