> they walk you through coding, but they hide a lot of the process. That's what they should be doing. Having been trying to teach myself this stuff since phot

> they walk you through coding, but they hide a lot of the process. That's what they should be doing. Having been trying to teach myself this stuff since photo.net and Ars Digita were hot, I can tell you, I spent 10 years stuck in Windows not knowing where to turn. Then I spent ten years learning all about everything around programming: editors, OSes, managing remote servers, languages, what those languages are for, algorithms, half-adders, little-endian vs big-endian, blah, blah, blah. And only in the last few years have I really gotten a handle on actually writing code that does stuff. Now I'm at the point I realize I'm way behind the curve on data structures but I have to say, I really wish I had been learning about data structures instead of how Bill Joy developed vi to cope with a slow modem. Sure, picking up Perl now, I can grab Padre and the Llama book and within a few exercises branch off on my own and add rewrite them with recursive functions and pretty interface elements, but I wish I'd been learning about advanced parsers instead.