[kat]

I dont have an exact book or course to recommend, but rather how to approach school courses...

I'm Canadian, and went thru post secondary in Canada. This is coming from someone who did not program for fun in highschool, had no family support/introduction to IT, no extra curricular programming introduction, etc.

I went to a collage instead of university. My first year computer courses had lab sessions where our teacher helped with programming assignments. There was ~10 kids in class. Uni classes were a few hundred kids in a single class and lab sessions were ~30 kids. They had TAs (teaching assistants, graduate students with no industry experience) instead of their professors during programming lab sessions. I got the same course credit, much cheaper tuition, and a much more practical programming education. I transferred to a university to finish my degree and I was embarrassingly ahead of everyone else when it came to programming.

Whatever course you do take, look for passionate people with a teaching background and a small class size.