Hi there, What I have learnt from my personal experience is that a Computer Programmer is the compound of programmer, graphic artist, data librarian, psychologist, manager & technical writer.

Main skills to acquire are solid concepts of Data Structures like Binary Tree, Stack, Heaps etc. Algorithms, solid programming concepts. Some personal skills required are innovation, determination, team player and thinking out of the box.

The best languages to start getting all the datastructures and algorithms into your bones is C & C++. Then once you have mastered all this then you should try to be innovative and apply these acquired skills to real world application.

During my university years, I was taught all languages from Assembly to COBOL, C to Java. But, I only took one language seriously and applied all my concepts in it and graduated. I used to do several softwares just for fun and ended up earning money out of them to support my studies. The projects I still remember were Chess game, Net Sniffer, Customized Compiler (I called it Nazeer++ :) ), Online Banking System and a lot others.

I read in the thread that you should also learn SQL, well you must learn SQL as there is no business application that doesn't do data manipulation.

What I recommend is, gather some of your college mates with similar interests as yours then start working together on a project. Do everything as it should be done. Do proper documentation, analysis, timelines & stuff and start cracking on with it. Get to the bottom of every detail untill you can see the electrons flowing through your hardware. :)

Cheers,
Mo