As important as reading and learning tools is; my experience is that you'll absorb much more by starting hobby projects and hacking your way through them. Afte

As important as reading and learning tools is; my experience is that you'll absorb much more by starting hobby projects and hacking your way through them. After you've set up a development environment (on your home machine / laptop will do), pick a project that's been on your mind and just start. Everytime you run into something you don't know how to do, hit stackoverflow, read through APIs, and figure it out. Piece by piece you'll become a programmer. Good luck!