That wonderful, wonderful spark that you get when it finally clicks for you. Here's my story: I'm a college student going into his second year of Computer Science, I've programmed in Visual Basic and C++. My experience with both was ok, Visual Basic just doesn't do it for me although I know for alot of people here it's a great language but I find it, boring?. C++ is a great language, very fun to work with but tedious although not as hard to grasp as some say, it does have it's steep learning curve though. Now I love programming dont get me wrong but I spent and entire year making forms on Visual Basic and console applications on C++ now it's awesome to see your screen show what you asked it to do and everything I mean the first time I wrote "Hello world!" on a screen through programming I was like a toddler with a new toy all excited . But they didn't give me that spark I don't know how to explain it.

See my desire is to become the owner of my own game studio one day ( big aspiration but it will happen!, even my girlfriend believes it will happen and her word is law so yea it will happen lol), back to the original topic lol. Anyways when I programmed those console apps and forms I was like "This is cool but not that wow".So I decided to start doing my own research in the programming world. Introduce the greatest C# book I have ever read( In my personal opinion not saying it is lol): Introduction to Programming Through Game development Using Microsoft XNA Studio, by Rob Miles( this dude is awesome!!!). Now the book is a bit dated but everything in it works just fine with XNA 4.0 (at least so far and I'm at page 156 or so). This book gave me that spark to just want to devour programming like anutcase, when I made my first game which was a simple moodlight and it changed colors on its own I was like oooh awesome, now when I made it so that I could change the color of the light with the xbox controller, one word my friend, EPIC lol. It is a silly game as he says but when you see those results you fall in love and they are fun results indeed.

He explains everything in a clear manner unlike my ahem "instructors" and even his jokes are fun to read. When you see your silly games running you cant help but be excited. So now I have that spark to know more and more, I've been learning everything I can about C# and I have to say, much easier than C++ and much more fun than VB. Also XNA is a really great framework, speeds up the development process by alot and it's easy to understand, I just hope with the release of metro windows 8 it doesn't get the short end of the stick. Honestly I just wanted to say that I now have that spark that I needed and I know most of you will read this and say "this guy is crazy" but hey I got it off my chest so I'm happy and am well on my way to creating my first "complete" crappy game lol

Indeed my good sir, but I did not know that and I was excited so yeah that happened

EDIT

Btw your game Gnoblins looks sweet

Agreed dude it is a great feeling

I feel the same way But i had different route:
highschool C++ (no oop)
studies:
bash scripts
C (on very advanced level, writing aplications for unix)
Assembly
back to C++ oop way
C++ and Opengl
C# forms
C# and XNA

And I stayed with the last one But still i get angry with xna limitations
My main learning technique was... Writing code. When I got stuck I googled, looked into books, asked friends, and eventualy ask on the forums:)
Also for C# i started it with workshop at my university ;)
And the sad thing is, the least helpful source were... lecturers :\

Nice work Rebel Coder. Keep it up!

Although, I must say - I think I have just had a cerebral haemorage reading the continuous text block. I managed to push through the pain barrier and get to the end though!

Thanks for the nice comments guys, made the post a little easier to read lol

Yeah it is an awesome feeling to get something working after trying to figure it out for a while although the same thing happens to me lol then I have to backtrack because I forgot where I left off on another problem.