I'm an electrical/electronic engineer, and I've always wanted to improve my software/programming skills, especially by learning some programming languages...

The employment situation in Nigeria isn't funny, and I believe the future belongs to those who can carve out a niche for themselves.

So here is the question: To experienced programmers, which software languages and skills will you classify as self teachable i.e. skills and languages that a serious student, with a bit of time, laptop and the right programs can teach himself, and those you believe a teacher must be involved. if you can state your answer with reasons, I will appreciate it more.

I am open to advice/suggestions and bashings, if that is the only route to get the information I seek. I stay in Port Harcourt, if that will help with your answer.

Happy Sunday.

Both self-taught and mentoring are good. The only true advantage with mentoring routes is being able to say that you went to "so-and-so" place and received "so-and-so" as proof of completing whatever program. Aside from that, the two routes are practically the same. A good online tutorial can, in many cases, be equivalent to an introductory mentoring program. Beyond that, it is reading and coding that improves skill.

As for which languages to learn, that really depends on what you aim to develop or what you want to do. But, in terms of learning curves, I would say that any of the popular scripting languages (Python, PHP, etc.) would be a good starting point. These scripting language generally have smaller learning curves. A laptop running pretty much any distribution of GNU/Linux would have you set up and ready to start programming in any of those scripting languages.

I would also suggest some sort of knowledge/familiarity with compiled languages. C is a good starting point. It's relatively simple. Also, the core of many popular, modern languages had, at one point in time, been implemented in C and their structures are still based off C in one way or another.