While at Hacker School, I have been working through SICP (Study and Interpretation of Computer Programming) with a small group of fellow students. SICP is a classic text in Computer Programming, and I now have a much richer understanding of why that is the case: while I have only worked through the first chapter, the authors have introduced me to programming as a series of abstractions and to the world of consequences to consider when choosing different processes or approaches to problems. I have practiced writing small scripts recursively and iteratively, and I can roughly determine the Big-O cost in time and space resources for small programs. This book is a terrific, though dense, undertaking. While I'm still reading it with the group, I've not been doing all the exercises lately because I've wanted to spend more time on my other projects.
I will restart the book with another group in January. Expect updates then!
###P.S. on Scheme: It has been loads of fun and well worth my time to become familiar and comfortable reading and writing code in Scheme. I highly recommend that any enthusiastic new-ish programmer read The Little Schemer, as so many fascinating languages and concepts require knowledge of Lisp-y syntax and functional programming as an approach to solutions. After only a few months of working in Scheme here and there, I am able to comprehend presentations in Clojure and Haskell that would have otherwise been entirely inaccessible to me.