Moving to OO

Hey, /prog/. Before college I'd always wanted to get into programming, but never could wrap my mind around it until I had an excellent professor for my C-based classes. Soon I'm going to start taking classes involving Object Oriented programming, but I know going in with no prior programming knowledge before made things extremely difficult. I'd like to start learning OO on my own time.

What's a good OO language to start with? My classes will primarily use Java, but I'm open to other suggestions.

With said language suggestion I'm also looking for a decent online reference. I've looked at some things in libraries but they're all "Teach Yourself (Language) in .21 seconds!" which is not what I'm looking for.

Thanks in advance for any advice and help.

if you already know C, you might as well just learn the OO part of C++ and use that and save yourself the trouble of learning a new language.  otherwise, learn Ruby.