Yes and no. (Hmmm, sound like a Tolkien elf there.) The opportunities have never been greater today and the barriers to entry have never been lower or cheaper.

Yes and no. (Hmmm, sound like a Tolkien elf there.) The opportunities have never been greater today and the barriers to entry have never been lower or cheaper. There are books and websites galore. If that doesn't help, there are forums and sites like stackoverflow.com. Never has it all been more exciting. Things that required large amounts of time on supercomputers are now doable at home in real-time. On the other hand, now that I'm in the old and crusty bucket, I'm personally having less fun as a programmer. I've been programming since 1981 and it was a blast. But now with a wife and family and pastoral responsibilities and day jobs and a growing congregation, the available time to just sit down and take time to learn something new (because it looked fun) just isn't there. And that takes some of the sparkle off my relationship with technology. That said, perhaps it isn't all gloom and doom. I do what I can to use technology in my life to help get things done. I have the church data backed up with Dropbox. I prepare my sermons using Markdown and Pandoc and preach off of a Nook. And just this week, I prepared the church charitable giving letters for the congregation using a combination of CSV data files, AWK and LaTeX. So I may not be the trendiest programmer in town, but my data is backed up constantly and I have some of the best typeset documents you've ever seen!