If you are thinking about learning how to program, then good on you! I thought I'd put up a page with a few resources that you might find useful. I reckon that the best thing you can do is learn C#, which is a nice, general purpose langauge which is becomming very popular.
First take a look at our teaching website, www.csharpcourse.com. That contains material which we base our first year teaching course on.
If you want a development environment you can get a reall good one for free from Microsoft. This is based on the professional tool which is used to write real world applications. It has a lot of features which can be a bit confusing at the start, but it is well worth getting into. Take a look here for that.
If you are looking for ideas for things to write, or programs to download and play with, you should take a look at Coding4Fun. This has some really nice stuff, including a program that I wrote!
If you are a student, you can ask us for a copy of our printed C# notes. This is a 190 page book which is used in our first year course. Enter a plea via my university WhereWouldYouThink community site here.
And remember, learning to program is fun. It is a bit like learning to ride a bike, rather tricky at first, and perhaps at some points you think you might never get the hang of it. But after a while it starts to come naturally and pretty soon you wonder what all the fuss was about.