Best Programming Language to start with?

Hello peeps. As someone who hasn't been lucky enough to be immersed into the world of programming when he was young, and has a hard time getting into it with net ressources, I need an easy and fast-learning language to start off with.

Any recommendations? Cheers!

Thanks for the pointers guys. I'm fairly comfortable with control structures and basic functions now (in C). I don't have that much time to invest so I'm checking out Perl and perhaps python over the summer (thanks to >>29 for the pointers).

I'll work my way up to more complex languages. Basic scripting languages are probably sufficient for what I need to do right now.