As for programming...I would really suggest perl.  It is very quick to 
develop in, and very clear and concise (when written correctly...)

So a hello world script would be:

#!/usr/bin/perl
## The first line MUST be that line, it tells the operating system where 
to find perl

## The hash-mark is a comment marker, any text after one on a line is 
considered
## Comments, and won't be processed by the programming language

## Lets start with the actual program

print "Hello World";    #All perl commands need to end with a semi 
colon, it tells
                                     #perl that you are done with the 
command

#Thats all there is to it, so without the comments that looks like:

+++++++++++++++++
#!/usr/bin/perl
print "Hello World";
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To run this program, you go back to the command line where you wrote it, 
and type "perl helloworld.pl" And you will see Hello World printed.

Now there is a problem with this output...it doesn't "push enter" after 
it...in order to make it do that, we need a special character that says 
"newline".  Well, one doesn't exist on the keyboard, so people made up 
"escape characters" which allow special things like newlines and a few 
other things to be easy to write.  All they are are a backslach "\" and 
a letter "n".  So a new line is "\n".  (On the off chance you actually 
WANT a backslash printed...you just have to use 2 "\\")

Now for something a little more fun...lets get some user input.

+++++++++++++++++
#!/usr/bin/perl

## A variable stores data..in perl, a variable is always prefixed by a $,
## and can hold any kind of information (numbers, letters, strings...)

print "Hi, what's your name?\n";
$input = <STDIN>;   #this reads one line from "Standard In" (the console)
print "Hello $input\n";

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