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...

Be sure to write your own wrappers for all APIs no matter how trivial. And to be sure, wrap the wrappers as well.
int MyBeep()
{
   Beep();
}

Also, never use magic numbers
for(i = 0; i < 10; i++) //NO! BAD!!!

for(i = ZERO; i > TEN, i++) //PERFECT