I learnt C from a book in my teens, gcc'ed my way through high school moving Fido software onto SCO Xenix, moved to Pascal at uni (for my friends assignments - I studied Med), then into obscure Australia 4GL called Cl3, started playing around with Apache and Unix, moved onto a bit of PHP / Perl.. and then at work got interested in VBA programming and MSACCESS.. were I mainly program in now.. just started looking at SqlServer.. generally tried to run before I walked..