> So if you have any sort of business where people pay you per click
This. This is the problem -- pay-per-click is completely and utterly broken, and has been ever since people figured out how to use bots effectively. For one, PPC is simply not compatible with real-time reporting, but there are myriad other problems with it.
And honestly, I don't know if it's even really a problem worth trying to solve, since there are better models out there already. "CPA" ads [1] are by no means perfect, but they obviate almost all of the problems you mention simply by their definition: the advertiser does not pay unless whoever clicked on the ad does something "interesting". Usually, this can mean anything from signing up, to buying something, to simply generating a sales lead, but the important thing is that "interesting" is defined by the advertiser themselves. Not by, say, Facebook.
Full disclosure: I'm an engineer at a startup that does, among other things, CPA-based ad targeting.
I know it has probably been said a million times before, but I have found that in many contexts, trying to tackle problems in a purely-functional style has helped me immensely. To that end, learning languages like Scheme and Haskell forced me to think of programs in a more algebraic fashion -- so many things can be accomplished in a concise, readable, maintainable fashion using basic functional concepts like function composition/bootstrapping, closures, and higher-order functions. Furthermore, because much of it is typically referentially transparent, code written in this way is often fundamentally "safe" in the sense that it lacks side effects, making it much less likely to segfault or do catastrophically bad things.
Thinking in a functional fashion also made it easy for me to pick up JS and start writing event-driven code almost immediately, because so much of modern JS relies on proper understanding of closures and asynchronous events. Furthermore, if you find you like functional programming, I also highly recommend teaching yourself Church's basic untyped lambda calculus; I found that it helped give me a much better understanding of the basic underpinnings of so many languages. Similarly, having an understanding of the fundamental concepts that underlie all programming languages -- such as the differences between call-by-value and call-by-reference, or static and dynamic scope, or the various kinds of OO systems (prototype-based, class-based, mixins) -- is really important. My knowledge of these has not only made it really easy for me to pick up and learn a language extremely quickly, but has also saved me on more than one occasion from a pitfall that I would have otherwise made (such as forgetting that older versions of Perl use dynamic scope by default).
Also, as many other people here have mentioned, coding up solutions to problems from ACM competitions, Project Euler, Google Code Jam, etc. is a great way to get good at just coding. It is also a great way to familiarize yourself with a language.
This. This is the problem -- pay-per-click is completely and utterly broken, and has been ever since people figured out how to use bots effectively. For one, PPC is simply not compatible with real-time reporting, but there are myriad other problems with it.
And honestly, I don't know if it's even really a problem worth trying to solve, since there are better models out there already. "CPA" ads [1] are by no means perfect, but they obviate almost all of the problems you mention simply by their definition: the advertiser does not pay unless whoever clicked on the ad does something "interesting". Usually, this can mean anything from signing up, to buying something, to simply generating a sales lead, but the important thing is that "interesting" is defined by the advertiser themselves. Not by, say, Facebook.
Full disclosure: I'm an engineer at a startup that does, among other things, CPA-based ad targeting.
[1] For those of us who don't work in ads, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_per_action has a decent explanation.