Depends on what you consider programming. I started making HTML things since 1996, you know: table layouts, no CSS, dial up connections. It was all static HTML with links and photos, nothing big.
I started off looking at source codes of other sites to see how they did it and shamelessly copied a lot.
Started working professionally in 2001 and learned CSS at the first company I worked for. At first it was a big hurdle, especially because the browsers back then weren't complaint, so you would think of a solution which then didn't work in 2 out of 3 browsers. This is in the time of IE 5, 5.5 and 6 (and Netscape!), so things have really improved since then ;)
Javascript was basically DHTML back then (remember Dynamic Drive?), no jQuery etc. That stuff all came later on.
From my point of view here's the things I would recommend:
That's about it really. :)