worst advice for starting programmers

do you have common knowledge of programing? or are you starting from square one?

If you have a understanding of structuring a language then go ahead and jump into something like Visual Basic or C++, depending if you want to program object oriented or not...

but if you have no knowledge, start with something easy like Pascal, just to learn how to structure things...

Alex broke it down pretty well...

my university's Undergraduate Computer Science Degree program is one of the best in the nation (Baylor University) and we learn C++ first, followed by 80x86 Assembly Language and Java. Also our Video Game Development club (run by 3 of the CompSci professors) uses Game Maker 7 as our primary tool.