What's a good programming language to start with?
Goladus: My suggestion is to find some problems that you need to solve before picking the language to use.  If you already know so Visual Basic, the languages I'd consider learning first, depending on my situation, would be:    Javascript
    C
    Python
    Scheme

Or maybe:    Erlang
    Haskell
    OCaml
    Mythryl

I have very little familiarity with the second set, I only recommend them because they have features that are much different from the first set, and if you are interested in a more functional approach it might be helpful to approach it less intellectual baggage from the imperative languages.Also, I only recommend learning C first if you plan to do a serious, thorough study of the language and need it for a low-level project.  Get C, A Reference Manual by Harbison and Steele, read the whole thing, and tackle a significant project with that knowledge.  You can make progress with a half-assed approach to learning Python.  If you try that with C it will be very painful.