Jason, be very careful about putting much weight on comments from programmers. When you get a bunch of guys (mostly guys) with the same skill together in one pl

Jason, be very careful about putting much weight on comments from programmers. When you get a bunch of guys (mostly guys) with the same skill together in one place, they'll tend to start spouting machoisms to show off. Programmers will say things like, "You don't really understand X until you can do <something I just learned to do>" or "You're not a REAL programmer until you <abandon some modern convenience in favor of the programming equivalent of stone knives>" or whatever. Ignore it. Programming is like any other skill, where mastering the fundamentals is the heart of it. There are a LOT of basic concepts---basic and composite data types and data structures, the difference between a thing and some kind of pointer to a thing, ways of repeating operations (looping or recursion), breaking big problems into small ones and building back up to the big, being aware of causes, symptoms, and cures for common errors (off-by-one bug, overflowing an int, testing floating point nums with equals, etc.) What matters most is training these basic ideas into reflexes and learning to easily match combinations of these basics to most problems you encounter. Learn the basics, then tackle lots of fairly simple, common programming tasks (google for sites that offer lots of programming exercises) until those basics become part of you. You should also work on "fun" projects of your own at the same time so it won't get boring. Forget the arcane and obscure features and techniques for a while. They won't make you a great programmer; mastery of the fundamentals will.