I thank you all supremely for your wonderful feedback!!! I must recap something that really stuck out in my mind - a comment made by Darkwingduck (i used to LOVE that show

) He/she said that if i want to SEE RESULTS FAST and BOOST MY CONFIDENCE..... yeeeeahhh!!!!! i love that idea. i will be honest with yu folks, i have already tried C++ (on my own) with 2 different books that i bought. i was bombarded with a plethera of information, and i just couldn't figure the freakin' language out!!! (to put it into simple termz!) So... that kind-of turned me away from programming, but now i am giving it another chance. i think that starting out on the "grand-daddy" of programming languages (as someone said

) C++ - i should start on an easier language, something to BOOST MY CONFIDENCE!! (i.e. --> Visual Basic!) Delphi seems to be dying off.
welp, there's my 2 pennies.
any other help?
ANY GOOD BOOK RECOMENDATIONS???
BTW, my school is too cheap to put any sort of computer programming into the corriculum, so i'm on my own!!! =) we have cisco though!
.thanx guyz.
dj