Learning to program

My friend told me that starting with Java is a good idea because it's easy and it works on all platforms. Is this true or should I start with something else?

>>8
C++ is basically just C with a good preprocessor.  In some ways, the difference is small.  In other ways, the difference is big.

Learn C before you learn C++.  In C++, there's a lot of almost-redundant concepts (pointers-references, class-struct, new-malloc).  You don't need to be a C guru, but you should at least be comfortable with writing basic C data structures (implement a linked list type stuff) before you get into C++.

Don't get too excited about OO either, "Object Oriented Programming" basically amounts to "Hide the Details of How Stuff Works".  It has it's place, but for the purposes of learning, this is bad.

It's a bit terse, but "The C Programming Language" by Kernigan and Ritchie is -the- book to learn C from.  It is important that you allready have *some* programming experience before getting into this (programming in BASIC counts).