Setting up Linux teaches system administration skills. Useful, but nothing to do with programming. Learning Emacs is fantastic (I'm a huge fan), but again — nothing to do with programming. For that matter, writing a blog engine should not be someone's first exposure to programming. Frameworks and web development should be simply banned for people who haven't yet written a Fibonacci sequence generator. Please don't waste your time learning how to integrate other people's services and APIs. You aren't ready for this yet.
Don't think about tools, think about concepts. Learn about how programs flow. Learn about data structures, the basics of algorithms, and recursion. Understand how and why programs are structured the way they are. This stuff isn't hard, and won't take more than a few weeks to learn. Then you should look around at tools and at the kinds of problems you want to solve. In the meanwhile, you'll only slow yourself down if you try to run (e.g., figure out why web frameworks work the way they work) before you can walk (e.g., understand functions).
Setting up Linux teaches system administration skills. Useful, but nothing to do with programming. Learning Emacs is fantastic (I'm a huge fan), but again — nothing to do with programming. For that matter, writing a blog engine should not be someone's first exposure to programming. Frameworks and web development should be simply banned for people who haven't yet written a Fibonacci sequence generator. Please don't waste your time learning how to integrate other people's services and APIs. You aren't ready for this yet.
Don't think about tools, think about concepts. Learn about how programs flow. Learn about data structures, the basics of algorithms, and recursion. Understand how and why programs are structured the way they are. This stuff isn't hard, and won't take more than a few weeks to learn. Then you should look around at tools and at the kinds of problems you want to solve. In the meanwhile, you'll only slow yourself down if you try to run (e.g., figure out why web frameworks work the way they work) before you can walk (e.g., understand functions).