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I've been working through the SICP book, which is scheme, and probably not at all applicable to what I want to do. That's my meager programming background.

If you're doing that, I'd encourage you to follow along to the lecture from Brian Harvey's Computer Science 61a class at UC Berkeley. He's teaching it this semester, and they generally have the lectures available for streaming for the rest of the semester after the class. It was my first college level CS class, and I still consider it the best one I took. The web page linked isn't updated for this semester yet, but it should be soon.

Matthew