The problem is that the world of programming is huge, what you really need to do is to tie down which area(s) your are interested in. Try taking a task you do manually right now and automate (program) it.

Do you always go to the same web pages and enter the same things? Look at something like WWW::Mechanize and play with that.

Rather than using Windows Explorer or a shell to run other programs, run them from a Perl script, automate their running and keep an audit trail of their results, possible in a MySQL or SQLite database.

The world is your oyster!