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?

Ignore >>4 and >>5
Pay attention to Dijkstra:
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."

The language MIT use to teach their students programming is Scheme. Unless you think you know better than MIT, I suggest you try that. Here is an excellent online book: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dorai/t-y-scheme/t-y-scheme.html