I want to learn Bioinformatics

I was recently involved in an online discussion about learning bioinformatics and what would be the best first steps to do so.
Is important that we clear the air from the beginning, there is not an specific path or golden way to learn the tools and to master this discipline. From my personal experience it has been a lot of self education and curiosity. But if you ask me what do you absolutely need to embark on this quest, I would have to say that is a very low frustration level. If you get easily frustrated when Windows takes more than two minutes to restart a frozen program you may want to re consider this challenge, you may find yourself trowing your computer across the room surrounded by very frightened co workers.

So if after some self criticism you believe that you have the patience and curiosity that it takes, here is what it has been more or less for me.
I have to say that I do not consider myself a bioinformatician but I can strike some keys, kind of write some scripts and run some analysis on different platforms.

Allow me to lay it down by some numbered and explained points:

1. Learn the basic of UNIX/LINUX command lines: Sorry there is no way around this, you want to be a super geek and you don't know what #$ ls does? Please get it together!!! Almost every tool you will use will be called from a terminal using command lines so the best thing to do is to learn some basic terminal commands and how to move around.

Right now, stop reading this, and try to open a terminal in your computer and play around, look for UNIX (Mac) commands, here you have a good list and nice examples. If you are wondering what is the difference between LINUX and UNIX... there is none!! LINUX is basically the free version of the license dependent UNIX.

2. Play a lot with your terminal: After learning some commands use them!!! open a terminal and try to do basic tasks using some command lines.
Make directories; open files; look into files; move around directories and so on.
This will allow you to get use to the terminal and the idea that things come in like arguments and come out as outputs.

3. Stay updated and read: If you want to work in bioinformatics, read read and read!!! papers, websites, twitter, all sources where bioinformatics tools are used. Ask yourself what tools are they using? What new tools are being proposed? New algorithms ? It doesn't matter if you don't understand all of it, get familiar with what is going on in the field.

I think this is a good beginning for now, in my next post I will give you some online tools for practice with real problems and learning some programming languages.
I hope you start today a nice and fun adventure and enjoy the quest !!!