Several players have indicated a desire to learn programming over the past several years, so I thought I'd share that the Pragmatic Bookshelf is having a 50% off all ebooks sale over the next week, notably http://pragprog.com/book/ltp2/learn-to-program. This book uses the Ruby language (https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/) as its teaching tool, which is easy to setup on whatever OS you're running and generally awesome (it's my favorite language).
They of course have a lot of other books too, and the promo code is turkey2013.