Say, someone who has no prior experience with programming, and is at a rather 'young' age (Teen still) wants to get ahead of the game, and start up now, rather than later. Would one go about this by reading SICP? I've seen it linked so many times, I've only got to think it's a start.
Lua's pretty similar to Javascript. They both have things in common with scheme. (Dynamically typed, good functional programming support.) This is kind of related: http://www.crockford.com/javascript/little.html . I imagine you could do the same transliteration with Lua (in fact that'd prolly be pretty awesome).
Linked lists are nice, but having hash tables as a first class citizen is really nice too.