Alan Dayley wrote:
> Python.
>   
Absolutely NOT PYTHON. It breaks the first two rules of programming, the
assignment operator (=) assigns values to a variable, and always ignore
whitespace. Well my first two rules, at least. Plus it sucks at
consistent use of object-oriented programming.

If you *really* need a general-purpose programming language, look at
Ruby, it's slightly more well behaved. Slightly. I would recommend
Javascript, it's a major programming language, and you can run it in
your web browser with literally nothing to install. Plus Javascript is
closely related to XML and HTML, while not programming languages, are
markup languages (a way of storing data) that is becoming very important
to know for many things. Though designed for the web, many of these
things are finding themselves become part of everyday computing,
especially XML. For these things, http://www.w3schools.com/ is popular.

Any scripting language might be a good start at learning about
if/then/else logic, but none of these languages are going to teach how
computers really *process* or *store* information on the inside (how the
CPU executes the program or how variables are stored in memory), or for
that matter write an actual interactive computer program, you will need
a real language like C or C++. After learning something like Javascript
you will find C surprisingly limited in functionality if you try and do
things the same way, especially variable-length variables like strings
and arrays. Keep that fact in the back of your head for when, if, you
attempt C/C++.

Whatever you do, Google "<x> tutorial" should bring up something good.
In the way of books, however, you can't miss ones from O'Reilly (
http://oreilly.com/ ), they are jade/teal and have a random animal on
the cover.

Austin Wright.
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