I'm "relativley new" to programming. I only took Java for a semester in college. The most advance thing I did was make a very simplistic "Pong" style game that only took about 100 lines of code or so. (If I'm remembering correctly). I'm not a complete noob, but I know I definetely have a lot to learn, and could still use a lot of insight on this. As far as the other programming goes, like I said, it is similar to C/C++ or so they so. I'm not sure how similar they really are.

I wish there were tutorials using a sane subset of C++, but I don't have time to write one myself.

I think a well chosen subset of C++ would be a very good beginner programming language.

If you took a half decent C tutorial and replaced most of the arrays with std::vector and (more importantly) replaced all char arrays with std::string, you would get quite close to teaching a good beginner language that is a subset of C++ (replacing char arrays with std::string includes replacing most of the C library calls that act on char arrays with std::string equivalents).

Your objectives seem to leave you in a conflicted state. On the one hand you seem to want to be a SysAdmin or at least have that as part of your role. As such, it is almost a requirement to be able to at least read bash scripting, since most of the usual Linux startup and configuration scripting uses it. On the other hand, bash is a poor choice for learning programming techniques in any general sense, because it's syntax and structure is so ugly. A more conventional language to study for the purpose of learning programming in a general sense could be any one of Python (my first recommendation), C (but not C++), or Java. All three of those languages are general enough to be widely useful, and have a large body of existing code, maturity, and future. Python & Java are both designed to use object oriented methods, which seems to be quite fashionable if you're looking to enhance your resume. Certainly there are other languages that are popular, although less mainstream (Ruby as an example) or less 'pretty' (Perl, as the primary example).

--- rod.