Training/skills to become a good QA engineer

Training/skills to become a good QA engineer

I've done a search for similar questions before but it seems they only
mention a few books or talk about soft skills, they seem to like training
resources for becoming a tester and there is little to no mention of
training resources for test automation.
So for background I'm a CS grad who doesn't seem to have a great ability
to develop, at least not yet. I went into finance and worked for two years
in support/development and got on very well, unfortunately my application
got quite popular and therefore the team was heavily regulated, this meant
I went to strictly support and low level so I wasn't happy with the lack
of complexity.
As a result I decided to try a different industry and have went back to
technology and got a job as a QA engineer. I am fully aware I cannot rely
solely on my employer to provide the skills necessary to become a good QA
Engineer.
Therefore I wish to firstly cement soft skills as a good QA tester which I
believe I already have. i.e. an eye for detail, enjoy a good puzzle. What
technical skills do people feel are required to be a good 'manual' tester?
Lastly the main reason I took this jump was to get into automated testing
as I believe it will allow a jump in complexity and perhaps a side move to
development when I'm good enough. Where do I start in becoming good at
automated testing?
The standard advice for a dev is to start developing personal projects?
What about a tester? Is it the same so then you can test your project
thoroughly? I've often seen it said you should be testing OTHER peoples
code mainly. So how can I get this exposure?
Just for additional info, I've been researching a bit myself and have come
across a few products like selenium to play with and reading the google
testing blog. On top of this I've started two udacity classes, one for
software testing and one for debugging. Any further suggestions? Any
decent books to help me feel a little less lost in my current situation?
Thanks for any advice you can provide