I would have to agree with thinking as well. When I first started programming I would just brute force my through whatever problem. After some years I realized

I would have to agree with thinking as well. When I first started programming I would just brute force my through whatever problem. After some years I realized that the 3rd or 4th iteration of something was commonly the best solution and the rest were crap. Then I realized I could skip the coding for iterations 2 and 3 and just think about the problem a little harder, and go do some reading about it. Thinking works and it saves me a lot of time and frustration. Learn an editor Emacs or Vim. I like Vim. Learn a scripting language Perl or Python. I like them both, for me Python gets the edge.