[gpcz]

If I could tell my 17-year-old self (who had already learned a high-school-friendly subset of C++, SQL, and a scripting language or two) the fastest accelerator for learning general programming concepts, I'd say learn a form of Lisp. I started by doing some of the 99 Lisp Problems ( http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~meidanis/courses/mc336/2006s2/func... ) and then took a class in my Master's program that taught with Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming by Norvig. I like functional programming in general because I haven't found a simpler way to represent certain types of sophisticated algorithms like searches, sorts, pattern matching, etc. You may want to try it out and see if you like the style.