I am being as subjective as possible, but honestly for anyone starting out in programming perl is probably the way to go. It makes learning to program in it's language and others simple. You can pretty much walk over to any other C style language and pick up the basics pretty swiftly once you know perl, (As well if you were to start with any other C style language.)

I honestly have to say that in a programming ascept and a learning ascept perl is the way to go. I really love the language, it is my favorite, there are other reasons, that I won't explain here.

As for being an anti-hacker. Forgive me if this comes out wrong, but to become something that goes against hacking you have to first learn to hack, so you are going to have to get your feet wet. Just set up a test box, so you can try out things. It's a good way to try out your code, it's also a good way to try and see if you can make your own exploits, or use existing one's. It really is a good way to learn.

Hmm... I have to say though, if you are really interested in learning to program start out with projects for yourself. IMHO the hardest part of learning to program was finding something to program. I would spend hours days, weeks looking for something to code. Shit, I still do.

No matter what language you choose, I recommend that you become friendly with a channel on an IRC server that specializes in that language. It really makes you learning a lot better. Just sitting in a channel you can learn a lot.

If you pick up perl, try freenode. You will catch me and many other people that are 10 times better at coding than I will ever be.

Whatever you choose, good luck.

wow thanks 4 the info and plus i do kick it in ICQ chat rooms a lot .

I didn't read everything but: ASM is only hard to people who started off with programming languages that don't require you to know anything about computer internals. The book "Programming from the ground up (google it)", teaches someone with no programming experiance, how to program in ASM as a first language (Linux x86), for the simple fact that you will learn more from it. I personally thought the book was fairly good, although i wasn't reading it from a first language standpoint, the only reason I found anything difficult was because I was used to HLL. Weither it is the easiest language I don't know, I've only used a couple, but I will say screwed if i'd use asm for a large project, debugging's a B****!

COOL IDES FOR LINUX: Anjuta is nice, kdevelop that has been mentioned, Quanta (made for html but supports tonnes of other languages!) to name a few. Quanta I havnt played with much but it looks nice. I like that in an IDE

*edit: typos.. wireless keyboard needs new batterys