I first learned BASIC with a friend that owned a Spectrum. We made some funny programs: a naive game similar to Space Invaders, a tracker that I feeded with a B

I first learned BASIC with a friend that owned a Spectrum. We made some funny programs: a naive game similar to Space Invaders, a tracker that I feeded with a Bach fugue, things like that. Years later, I enrolled CS. But 90% of what I learned was at home with a 286 that another friend lent me. Materials: books from the university library and technical manuals for the languages. TurboPascal manual was excellent. I guess they're outdated to recommend, but my favourites were Pascal and Data Structures by Dale & Lilly and File Structures: A Conceptual Toolkit by Michael J. Folk & Bill Zoellick. I wrote a B-Tree implementation that put Clipper's to shame. When Delphi was released (95), I bought it, binge-read the manuals and did several personal projects. The rest, at work, facing difficult problems, reading a lot, consulting online forums... and specially answering others' questions.