lowlyscientist

That's true, I do recall skimming through the very early parts of SICP.

I'm jealous of Emma, I bet that would be a really strong base for building programming skills.

Was it easy to pick up the freelance jobs? One of my colleagues recommended just applying for contract work with a low rate - sort of just for a foot in the door - but I have yet to try this. How did you go about it?

Abelson-Sussman's SICP is a steep learning curve for an absolute beginner: I'd recommend reading How To Design Programs first (and SICP right after), which is similar but a bit more gentle. It also uses Scheme, but focuses most at how to think about programming problems, and general "design recipes" for solving them.

I am very interested to hear about difficulties one might face doing this, as I'm in a similar situation. Currently I am a scientist in R&D for a blue chip company, but have been programming for fun and as a small part of the job for a couple of years. I'm interested in moving to a full-time programming job, but am worried about the typical minimum requirements; after all, I have no CS degree and haven't been coding since a young age.