I am on my 4th year at university, studying physics. Attend all lectures and write them down thoroughly. We also have seminars where we solve mathematical and physical problems, don't miss them too. Do not feel any necessity for using books at all, can't say the same about my classmates, though. Some fast revision before exams is all I need after term.

Russia here. Siberia, currently near town Aleysk (born there), but most of time I live in Novosibirsk.

To begin with, I am not professianal programmer, It is just hobby. My serious programming experience started with Pascal (ABC I think) in high school. I didn't really liked the language, but I loved programming itself. Wrote couple programms. First one consisted of generating labyrinth and walking through it using keyboard, algorigthm of finding way included. Another one - modeling simple ring collisions. I find this problems quite interesting to start with, there may be some difficulties with graphics, though. Later on, I started learning C one summer myself, liked it more then Paskal, studied basic syntax, pointers, classes, streams (then, way later, templates and inheritence). Programs I wrote were: file input/output - just to sort it out; programm couting days between 2 dates - I used classes there first time and labyrinth again. Then there were cources at university, have written 3D game analogic to infinite tic-tac-toe using DirectX as a project - do not really recomment go into such thing. Year later wrote programm (on MFC), plotting graphic of given formula - that was goog programming experience. Now I am working with raw Windows API. So, if u don't want to go into web programming I would recommend to start with c or c, if you haven't much programming experience. There are plenty of tutorials for begginers, I suppose all will do. Try to think of some problems for yourself and solve them. Do not rush into using graphics (use pseudographics), API and additional libraries. When you will want to do more advanced stuff, be ready to study much of documentation. Oh, and I'm quite satisfied with Visual Studio.