I'd never touched a computer until I bought one for my son about 9 years ago. He showed me the basics of how to use it but I still only really 'know' what I've needed to learn along the way. At about the same time the photo magazines were giving step-by-step guides to the basics of photo image manipulation - the essentials such as Levels, USM, etc., so I kept these until I got firstly, a scanner and then a digital camera.
Provided you've got it 'about right' in the camera then you only need these few essentials to make a decent print. Everything else will come with time and experience and I've only touched a small part of Photoshop so far - part of the fun is finding new options along the way, either by chance or by reading articles, picking up tips here on WPF, etc.
Film/chemistry is all very well but it's a sight more inconvenient if you haven't got a permanent darkroom. For most of us, adapting another room temporarily was the only option and this causes problems with dust as you move things around (no matter how clean you think your house is!), plus all the wasted time blacking-out, moving stuff around, etc. 'Nearly' full black-out is acceptable at the printing stage and a safelight means you can see what you're doing, but with films you have to load them into the developing tank in complete darkness, so whether you use a changing bag or go under the bedsheets at night, you've got to do everything by 'feel.'
Black and White was more or less the order of the day as, without a proper set-up, colour-printing is far more difficult and not much fun (developing your first slide film is exciting when you first take the film out of the reel, though!).
Take a colour negative into half a dozen different shops and have a reprint made and you'll more than likely get 6 different prints back with varying exposure/colour balance - if they can't get it right with their expensive automatically set-up equipment what chance have you got fumbling around in the dark!
This is where digital scores - you can get it looking how you want before printing it and you only need to pay for those shots that you want to keep - no more fuzzy out-of-focus/badly-exposed shots to bore other people with. Every shot you show to your friends will be a good 'un and your reputation as a photographer will go up in leaps and bounds!
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