Ah, I can't remember the details anymore =) But it was something like starting with C-64 BASIC, reading a tutorial somewhere and just copying some simple examples. Yes there was a finnish magazine which often had good examples, tutorials and hints both for novice and advanced programmers. And once one gets the basics, then it becomes rather simple to go on exploring. When we started learning assembler, we bought "Commodore 64 Programmers Reference Manual", which was a good guide for learning more.

Learning by doing, that's the way it goes.

I remember when I started learning PC programming, I first wanted to learn assembler. One of the first things I wrote was a tile-graphics engine. It was written in Pascal, but had inline assembler for actual drawing of a tile. The code worked at my computer but failed when I tried it with the machines at school. I started to suspect that things won't be so simple as they were with the good old C-64 =)