Programming Languages My first exposure to programming languages was at Peter's home. He showed me something he made in QBASIC where you guessed a random number that the computer generated. The game itself was uninteresting, but when he showed me how he'd made it I was fascinated. I could do that. So I taught myself using the help menu. It was tedious progress on an old Pentium 386, but this was long before internet and instructional books.

Years later, my family got a modem, and soon after, my friend Dale introduced me to mIRC. The interesting thing about mIRC was that you could develop your own scripts, and since the language was similar to what I already knew, I was immediately fascinated. Once again, using help menus and examples, I programmed several different scripts, including a bot that people could play various games with. Soon after that, I learned how to program in HTML, once again self-taught, and made a few simple web sites, like this one and this one.

I'm not sure how I came about learning PHP and MySQL, but most likely it was as a result of talking to Rob. (Rob runs Logical Hosting, which I recommend to anyone looking for domains.) They were fairly simple languages to learn, albeit much more powerful, and there were a few peculiarities to the languages that made my self-instruction more difficult than it had to be. Then, as of a week ago, I've been learning CSS. Yes, on my own.

Ahh, the story of one geek's progress.  ¶ 10:02 AM