New to Programming - advice?

Hello,

A little background. I am a sys admin of 3 years on UNIX (Mainly SCO/AIX). I have been in technology for many years, never have gotten into the programming side. I have not really found any good resources for learning proper scripting. I am very limited in that arena.

After reading much here... (Good luck, Tom!) I believe I am looking for two things:

1) concepts of structured programming. (Start from the start right? Need to take a class?)

2) A good shell scripting howto.

hmm maybe from there Perl?

I have a SED and AWK ref book which can speak volumes on statements, but it is all the passing of variables and how to do it I get lost on.

Thanks guys