[khedoros1]

I started with a weird mix, but mostly top-down: jumping through a QBasic programming book, picking up basic concepts as necessary to build things that sounded cool (a music player, an Asteroids clone, etc). Programming ended up feeling like a cool toy.

My serious education took a fairly strict bottom-up approach, and it explained roadblocks I'd been running into before, improved my mental model of the machine (and variations between machines), and provided a solid foundation to build on.

My opinion is that top-down is good for passion, bottom-up is good for correctness, and a mix of both is useful. You need passion to put in the necessary practice time. You need a solid foundation to let you build non-trivial software.