I have learned programming using IDL. It was my primary development language from 1997 until 2010 while I did my masters, phd, post-docs and clinical scientist job in medical imaging field (MRI, fMRI and ASL). Most of it was before Google, StackOverflow et al. I learned mainly from the newsgroup and David Fanning.

This archive has two purposes: 1) preserve the code, and 2) serve as an example of what individual scientists have to do to get their actual work done (and not being able to claim much credit for it).