Teaching myself

Okay, I want to teach myself programming.

I tried SICP first.  I hit section 1.2 and realized my skills are just not up to par for a book aimed at MIT students.

I'm thinking now of hitting a thorough-but-practical book.  From some quick searching "C Primer Plus" seems to generally be what I want.

On the side I plan on beefing up my math skills in preparation for eventually moving from programming to deeper comp sci type stuff.

What does /prog/ think?

fyi if you ever want to be ANY good at recursive programming then suck it down and learn some scheme, and the best way for that is sicp