Wow, if you two read all those books, I'll be impressed!

IMHO: You should have an idea of what you want to program as well. I've found learning programming much easier to learn when I have a specific project or task I want to complete.

Also, I think you can spend a lot of time worrying about the "right" way to write code; e.g. the posts discussing singletons above. Try and get your first project working and "finished" before you worry too much about the state of the code.

Good luck in your programming adventures; especially with (((Lisp))(which)(I)(never)(really liked))))...