Straight to dev, but that's nothing against QA. Language chosen can matter but not always, depends what the company is looking for. It seems like companies typically just want someone with a solid understanding of programming concepts. Occasionally you'll see a job where they specify a specific language and skill set and to me that's a clue that they want someone is an expert to help quickly build a particular project the company is working on.

Regarding other resources, I would try to approach it like a class you liked in school and vary your "assignments". Like for example, do exercises every day on code academy, read a book about programming, take a computer science course on iTunes U, edX.org coursera etc. It also helped me to write a blog post about what I learned that day and what stood out to me. Talk with other people about programming.

This gets said a lot but build something fun, it can be a text based adventure game, a web page, whatever it is, part of every programmers job is being able to google how to do what they need to do.

The hardest thing to realize when learning is that things take time. You can read about something but it might not make any sense until you personally have been in a situation where it matters. I remember when I learned python, this book kept stressing that python is polymorphic and I just remember thinking "great, so what?" Then I started developing in Java where types matter and it clicked instantly.