You can become a programmer from a non-programming computer profession. I was a sysadmin for a decade. Now I code all day and get paid for it. I'm in London too if you want to come talk at the London HN meetup next Thursday.

I suggest your issue may be you don't have the patience for a lot of non-practical beginner type programming tutorials. Reading a book about Sally and John sends you to sleep. It sends me to sleep too.

Here's what to do:

Make something really small that's useful to you.

> Myself, I am a telcoms/Network Engineer with knowledge of VoIP systems and Cisco.

Great!

* You need to SSH into boxes and run IOS commands right?

* Do people hand you spreadsheets with stuff to do?

* Maybe check if there's port capacity on a switch or something similar?

I'd make the smallest possible app to do that.

* First have it log into a box, run a command, and print the output

* Next perform some filtering, so rather than printing the output, it will check for something and tell you directly which ports have capacity.

* Next make it loop through multiple boxes in a text file

* Next make it read an Excel file with the switch names.

Python can do this (Paramiko does SSH, the xlrd & xlwt modules read and write Excel), and is also currently the teaching language of choice. It's more interesting than Java and more straightforward than PHP.

After that, I bet you've got some horrible annoying EnterpriseThing that outputs some ugly XML, right? The lxml module has a cool feature called xpath so you can extract the thing at '/report/stats/item[1]/' and do reporting on it. You can make save it as JSON and use OpenFlashChart to make a cool flash chart of the results.

Suddenly you're the guy that got info about 60 switches this morning. And made cool capacity charts. People will love you for these simple ideas, and it will make it easier to work on your more complex ideas.