Where does a wannabe hacker begin?

I definitely agree with finding something you want to build. One of my friends taught himself programming using me to bounce questions off of every now and again, and the hardest part seemed to be when he abstractly wanted to keep learning programming, but he was just too bored at the moment to keep going.

Find something fun to build, the smaller the project the better. Keep working on it until you can't bring yourself to work on it any more, then repeat with a more ambitious project.

The best way to do this, is whatever idea you have, try and build it using Ruby on Rails. You may make some mistakes, but the best thing about Rails is that many of the architectural decisions are made for you. You only really need to worry about the syntax once you get the hang of it.

Lots of the other advice on here, about learning C, and SICP, and emacs and CS fundamentals is nice but not necessary. Learning it will be very hard for an absolute newbie to get anything out of. It could demoralize you.

Thats why I'd advise to actually start building whatever it is you have a startup idea for. It will give you traction. You will definately struggle, but at least you'll have something concrete to show for your efforts. And I'd use Rails. If you run into problems you can always go the rubyonrails IRC channel or even ruby-lang. You'll get the hang of it. If you are going to take this route I'd recommend the Rails book by DHH.

Eric Raymond is an excellent writer and you can't go wrong reading this article.

Also, learn how to do mathematical proofs. I don't know what the best way to do this is. I learned from 10th-grade Euclidean geometry class. Maybe you can pick up a good book on Euclidean geometry that has a lot of exercises in it.

Finally, pick up a good book on Lisp that has a lot of exercises in it and do all the exercises in it. Winston and Horn is good. "The Little Lisper" is also good.

Most school charge roughly 50% of regular tuition rates to audit a course (attend lectures without earning credits.) They will usually allow you to complete all the coursework and get feedback as part of the auditing arrangement. Getting caught attending lectures without being enrolled can have implications beyond just being kicked out...you're essentially "stealing" an education. They can charge you with theft or criminal trespass. As someone who has a criminal record for trespassing, I'd advise you to just enroll in any course you really want to attend ;-)

Given your econ major, surely there must be some interesting problems you have come across that you would like to attack by writing some programs?

Python is a great language to dive into. Easy to learn because it intentionally left out most of the boiler-plate fluff from other languages and lets you just express your solution in a direct, concise fashion.

If you get to the point where you need to crunch large number sets, check out scipy and numpy (just google). Takes a slight effort to set up initially, but then allows you to quickly process lots of numbers. Linear algebra, optimization, etc.