Myself, I'm still slowly learning. Coding came out of necessity. I've been working for different technical support jobs for pretty much my whole adult life, and

Myself, I'm still slowly learning. Coding came out of necessity. I've been working for different technical support jobs for pretty much my whole adult life, and started off trying to automate a couple of things around the office, and then for clients (a PHP script that generated a regex which configured a client's email account in Outlook Express, for example). I created a couple of useful things which gradually became more complex - a little voicemail queue (where we'd enter client messages and then call them from the top, in a cycle), then generated a map of our client's locations using google maps, etc. Nowadays I'm fairly fluent in JavaScript, VBScript (don't laugh!), and I'm gradually learning Python simply because it's something that I need to learn for a project. I'm not a professional coder by any definition, I "get by" with a little help from my friend (who IS a hacker). So my advice would probably just be "go your own speed, on your own highway". It really depends on your needs.