A Few Hitches Along the Way

I recently quit my job at a major telecoms provider where I worked as a customer care representative (God - that sucked). I hated the job so much it's not funny. I decided to try my luck with a friend of mine. He works at a software company. The manager/owner is a really cool guy, he was the president of a local Linux User Group (LUG). So, who better to chat with than him. I went there spoke to him and showed him a couple of websites I was working on and tried valiantly to convince him to hire me as a "whatever" in his company, you see, I am desperately in need of the money. I guess he technically sort of agreed and he said he had a website he had to work on and he wanted to give it to me to have a go at reformatting the website and adding some content to the really crappy site the original developer made a mess of. So, here I am doing websites in XHTML and CSS, I get the impression this is a kind route to take for an aspiring programmer like myself. XHTML with CSS sort of teaches some "practices" that are necessary to have as a programmer, therefore that's the route I took.

Languages

I did a little search on the net (Google, duh) for "best Programming Languages Beginners" and you wouldn't believe what it returned. I got one load of hits telling you pretty much every language out there, can you imagine the heartache that brings, I even got one person suggesting the language Brain@#$%. That was pretty much a daunting experience - every thing you read pretty much suggested a different programming language. I decided to drop that and ask a friend whom I think of as a good enough programmer. He is quite (good I think), so he suggested that I start with C++, that I did and further reading got me totally interested in the world of PHP. I then decided to start with those two. My blog will be dedicated to the road I am currently on aimed at my being one of the best programmers I know. I want to, within the next two years be functionally proficient in at least 6 programming languages these are listed below:
1. C++
2. PHP along with MySQL
3. XHTML and CSS
4. Java
5. C
6. Python

What do you guys think of my choices as languages to learn? I would like to hear from you. And remember, this is sort of a journal of my road to becoming a programmer. I would also like it to be a good resource for anyone interested in becoming a programmer like myself.

The Interest

I know this will not be a simple task I'm about to embark on. I'm currently 23 and doing the Pure Sciences, I never knew I would be so interested in computer programming say five or so years ago. There was nothing to me like the Biological and Chemical Sciences, in high school Chemistry Biology and Physics were my first loves that was the route I took and am still on to this day until about a couple of months ago. I picked up the interest I now have in programming by fooling a round with a web-page I had saved. I went to VIEW then SOURCE and there it was a couple of almost indecipherable series of characters that sparked the interest I now have in the inner workings of a computer and how a web page was rendered. I did some reading up on HTML. In about two weeks I could write a webpage in Notepad, that was just so much fun, there the interest in the whole programming was started.

There is one problem now, I do not think HTML and XHTML is a good enough "language" to have to consider one's self a "programmer" per se - it does in fact teach you a thing or two about some basic rules of programming like syntax and so on. Therefore if you are a slow learner like myself then that would be a really less challenging way to start!