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I want to learn programming, maybe not to be a full-fledged hacker, but to be able to understand the concepts and be able to talk about this stuff more with programmers so I can work in tech?
I hear python and ruby are good to learn on, but what would you guys do or are there any good books you'd read?
www.hacketyhack.net is an integrated environment for learning ruby, the hardest part of learning ruby is setting up ruby on a web server.
I don't think it matters that much what you start with unless you have something in particular in mind you want to do, in which case, no matter what it is, choose Perl :)
Do want to learn Web programming? PHP is probably the easiest programming language to learn for server-side web programming. I've read several books on PHP and looked over a bunch, and a lot are pretty good, but one of the best is this one: http://www.amazon.com/PHP-MySQL-Development-Developers-Libra...
Just fine: Ruby. good, but less simple and elegant than Python.
Good if you want to deeply understand the principles of being a programmer but don't care about being very practical at the start: Lisp (yes, Lisp can be practical, but it's trouble for a newbie)
Avoid: Perl, PHP, BASIC variants. These cause brain damage.
Pick language X. Buy Learning X from O'Reilly, e.g. http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/learnperl4/ I don't think it matters that much what you start with unless you have something in particular in mind you want to do, in which case, no matter what it is, choose Perl :)