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The Best Introductory Language

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kyrathaba:
If you're set on jumping right into C++, and don't have a strong C background, check www.mindview.net for Bruce Eckel's excellent (downloadable) "Thinking in C".

I don't claim to be unbiased, but I have dipped my feet in several languages over the last few years (QBasic, C, Vb6, Vb.NET, Java, Pascal, and now C#), and C# has given me what I'm looking for.  C# was built from the ground up to take some of the best features from both C++ and Java, incorporating  them into one language.  And, C# was also planned, from the drawing board, to leverage the .NET Framework, which means a whole LOT of your coding has already been done for you.  I find C# more concise than Visual Basic, yet not as complicated as C++.  It shares a lot of similarities with C/C++, and you can get a free, very good programming IDE from Microsoft, and access to a tremendous amount of language feature documentation on MSDN. 

I agree with Lashiec that Pascal is a good starter language.  It contains pretty much all the programming structures you'll run into in other languages and has a clear syntax.  When I was in college, it was the language used in Introduction to Programming.  I also somewhat agree with Lashiec's thumbs-down to Visual Basic.  In particular, Visual Basic.NET is inelegant in comparison with C#.  It has some awkward stuff in it supposedly to make it backward compatible with VB6. 

Just my 2 cents.

tinjaw:
Just in case some of you weren't aware of it, a little bit of trivia: The Pascal programming language was written with the intention that it would be used as an introductory language to programming.

Crush:
I think the best for beginners is Assembler to understand the basics of the machine and help underständing how later developed languages are working inside. So you´ll be able to create more efficent code. Learning too much languages is only disturbing and confuses. It´s better to stay on a few and study them more intensive.

f0dder:
Assembly is not a good choice for the first language. You get completely lost in details, and a lot of people get pretty frustrated that they spend a lot of effort for almost no return. You need to learn programming first, then you can continue with Machine Architecture. And if people are introduced to assembly too early, they tend to become brain-damaged and obsess over each and every tiny little irrelevant detail.

I'd even argue that assembly is pretty irrelevant these days, unless you want to get into the embedded field, or audio/video codecs.

All that said, I do think some exposure to assembly (or rather, machine architecture as a whole) later on is a good idea if you want to be a full-fledged programmer, and not "just" a dotNET/delphi/bcb/vb/etc program interface designer.

dhuser:
I personally started with (and recommend) Visual Basic (or VB.NET) to beginner programmers. If any beginners want to start learning...
* Visual Basic Express Edition (FREE)- http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/vb/
* Learn VB Express Edition- http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/beginner/windows/tier1/
* Create your First Program- http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/beginner/windows/tier1/first/
It is visual and object-oriented.

Note that a LiveID/.NET Passport ID is required to register/activate.
dhuser

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