Programming and software engineering are not the same thing. You can teach yourself a bit of programming from books. Software engineering on the other hand re

Programming and software engineering are not the same thing. You can teach yourself a bit of programming from books. Software engineering on the other hand requires a far more holistic body of knowledge and experience. SICP and LPTHW are not in the same league. SICP is what you want to really grok if you want to become a software engineer and LPTHW is sufficient if you want to become a great Python programmer. PHP and Ruby are also fine starting points. But to be valuable as a potential hire you need to understand the APIs and main frameworks for the language you choose to become proficient int. Stanford, MIT and Google have excellent video courses publicly available if you prefer lectures to reading books. Either way, you need to write lots of programs, ideally for something that you are really interested in and get feedback from more experienced people.