[willgodfrey]

I asked something similar a few weeks ago here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2289974 Take a look at the comment I got, some good suggestions in there.

We are in similar boats, I am a structural engineer by day and have a tad of programming experience, mostly with Matlab and some VBA stuff. I wanted to start basic and proceed as necessary, skipping if I felt the material was too rudimentary.

Per the comments I got, I started with Zed Shaw's Learning Python the hard way (http://learnpythonthehardway.org/index). It's great so far. As wyclif mentions elsewhere here, the first half is incredibly simple, to the point that its nearly ridiculous. I've found myself performing the exercises quickly and moving on, if nothing else it's just plain good practice of the simple mechanics of writing code, even if the code I'm writing is rudimentary.

Also per the comments from that post, I registered and started a personal weblog using a wordpress template. It's given me my fair share of HTML work, which has also been helpful.

Good luck, enjoy the ride!