this_barb

With the faith in you, do you believe he can find rest? He's no mass-murderer and, as far as I can tell, he did everything by-the-book, angry-god, Old-Testament wise, but he certainly did not follow the teachings of Jesus Christ.

Also, where are you spiritually? I'm an agnostic atheist (key word on agnostic).

As a novice/intermediate programmer, I've dabbled in Java, C++, and Python. Out of the 3, Python is probably the "easiest" to learn in that the boilerplate stuff is really well hidden (at the expense of performance). It also looks nicer without the brackets (might be a problem, actually).

Regardless, just pick a language, and search Google for the very best comprehensive guide you can find. It should basically be composed into chapters, with each chapter ENDING with exercises that require you to program. There are a ton of one-off tutorials on the internet, but they will do you no good. You need to find comprehensive internet tomes that promises you an intermediate understanding of the language.

From there, you can start reading and learning. There are certain concepts in programming that may be hard to grasp from a single tome (functional programming, OOP, encapsulation, recursion, etc), so it isn't a bad idea to look into the learning about these from Wikipedia and other tomes (even if the tome is for another language).

At some point, you'll have an epiphany where you can somewhat easily understand all of the concepts and know how to get from point A to point B in programming (given a time to formulate it in your head). Then, you'll want to figure out how to refine your algorithms (basically the way you decide to solve a certain problem, i.e. the exercises at the end of each chapter). Unless you're god-like, the "most efficient" way to a solution isn't always readily apparent, and that isn't a big deal. No reason to re-invent the wheel.

At this point, you should have some sort of idea of what you want to create, since programming is, for lack of a better word, an art. So, if you have nothing you wish to create, why are you programming?

You want to automate your work? Plan it out and do it. You want to make some games? Same deal. At this point, you shouldn't have trouble with the language at all, so you should look for libraries and kits to simplify your workflow (since the core libs tend to be woefully inadequate for basically anything of a specialized nature). You're basically just cementing your knowledge and becoming faster, stronger, better.

Next, move to a different language.

Always the optimist, aren't you?

Does your job offer supplemental liver insurance through Aflac?

I'm using it from now on!