Well, I've been in business a while, so the first language I learned was called Cold Fusion (I think now owned by Adobe). I then tried learning PHP, but there

Well, I've been in business a while, so the first language I learned was called Cold Fusion (I think now owned by Adobe). I then tried learning PHP, but there was some kind of mental barrier there unfortunately for me, though I think I'd be OK with it these days. I then moved to Python which I've found to be a great language. There are a lot of free online books out there. In terms of investment in time, I just started off doing an hour a day. As I did not have anything specific to do, with any timeframe, this worked well for me and did not impact on the day-to-day activities. I will say though that you need to set yourself a challenge fairly quickly as this is the only real way to solidify the theory in your mind. The first one for me was a small crawler to screen scrape some data from a site, put it into a database and search it. One of my team could have done it much quicker of course, but the sense of achievement when it (finally!) worked was great. Hope this helps