I've been programming since I was about 9, I'm now 39, and still learning. There's no end to learning, just new perspectives to see. I believe your starting environment can have a significant effect on your progress. If you pick something too obtuse and low level it may get hard to grasp some of the basic concepts you will need to master. These days I'd recommend JavaScript since you can start quickly in the broswer without having to learn an IDE. Also having the DOM to play with right away is fun, easy with obvious visual feedback that what you are doing is working (or not). I'd also start simply with the basic language, from scratch (without a library). Just learn the language and syntax. Get the O'Reilly JavaScript book make your dead simple index.html with inline JavaScript and see what you can do. Only once you get the basics, migrate to a framework (jQuery's a good choice). Oh, you'll want FireBug (or something similar too).