I learned mostly in college. I already had a decent understanding of computers at that point from playing games and messing around with them. You don't need t

I learned mostly in college. I already had a decent understanding of computers at that point from playing games and messing around with them. You don't need to go to college to learn how to program though. Programming is just feeding a computer instructions. Since you are working with customers on *nix, that is a place to start. Start small with things like looping over a directory of files and outputting the name. This could be done in Bash. You could pick nearly any programming language and it will have File/IO libraries that allow you to traverse a directory. Sure you could just use "ls -l" on a command line and you should to compare your results. Start small, learn different ways to loop over things. Read docs. Its much easier to learn when you have some knowledge of the context you are learning in. Tech Support leads somewhat naturally into more of System Administration, which can have a fair amount of programming, mostly for automating things.