I've been teaching myself C for a little while and I plan to study programming in university. I was wondering what languages I should try next. I'd rather avoid web development if I can. I saw Microsoft's express books on VB and C# and was thinking of getting one of those. If you guys could suggest some books (titles, authors or publishers) that I could easily find in a book store like Borders (Chapters for me here in Canada though) I would greatly appreciate your help and someday I may be posting here a little bit wiser because of it.
Scheme: lets you branch out into LISP and Haskell, if for some ungodly reason you want to.
You don't know the reasons why one would want to get into Haskell or lisp yet you advocate scheme, and you even claim that language is worth my time, even though previously you admitted that you don't know the reason. Learn common lisp and don't touch scheme.
Lua: lets you branch out into Python easier, if for some reason Lua isn't good enough for you. WOWfags will love you, too. Really good Q&D language.
Who cares about WOW? You're saying a language is worth knowing because it will be useful for some time in a fad? "branching out" to python isn't something positive.
Python: it's a solid, popular language with lots of libraries, without the starbucks faddishness of Ruby. Unlike Scheme and Lua, it lacks TCO (but it can be sorta hacked in*).
Solid, popular language with a not-so-solid standard library, and an awful lot of 3rd party libraries abusing this short-seeing.
C: if for some reason you find yourself unable to accomplish something with the previous three, then you need C. Also, embedded systems need C, which can be fun.
Unlikely. Are you saying that from one side it is C, and from the other scheme, lua and python? C is worth to learn though. (Embedded systems don't need C actually)