My Computer Programming Journey

Today I've moved onto these topic areas. I now see the benefit of this: there is no need to keep copying the code to create each new instance(however copy and paste do seem to be 2 of my most favourite functions on the modern day PC). That said it seems to get mind-bogglingly complicated when you look deeper into the subject. For example using the same name for a slightly different function, perhaps with a different combination of value-types.

Well first of all thankyou for taking the time to read this.
The purpose of this blog is to document my learning, receive advice, tips and criticism and to advertise myself to potential employers.
I've recently started Microsoft's MCTS course with a focus on C# programming. My first task is to get a grip of the C# language. Up to this point I have a limited experience of BASIC which I learnt many years ago as a child. This peaked at the point of copying pages of code from various books and changing/playing around with parameters. I also cobbled together quite a mean audio-visual experience which involved a drum kit being drawn onto the screen whilst the tune of Good Thing played (Silverlight, flash-player and 5.1 surround eat your hearts out).
After an initial period of fumbling around with C# I've reached my current level. I now have a grasp of operators, value-types (well a few of the common ones, but I still wonder when I should use a double instead of a float or a decimal), variables, public, private, selection, objects, classes and arrays.
I'm still searching for my optimum learning balance between reading books, analyzing code and writing code. It appears to be very important to put recently acquired knowledge into practice by writing code and becoming familiar with the syntax. This seems to be the common challenge so far - often I know what I want to do but do not know how to write it. Arrays are a prime example of this. I can comfortably understand array coding and step through it in C# Express but I'm relatively clueless about writing it without an example in front of me to guide me through. But I'm sure practice will overcome this.
Sadly I don't currently work in IT so for now I'm limited to catching a few minutes to read my book during the day at work and a few hours in the evening on my PC.
I'm currently looking at classes in a little more detail than before.