On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 4:16 PM, Gabriel M. Beddingfield <gabrbedd@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, 13 Oct 2010, Josh Lawrence wrote:

Sparing you a lot of useless back story here, but for fun a for
personal amusement (NOT for serious work), I'd like to start learning
a programming language. If I'm gonna learn one, I might as well learn
something that gets a lot of use in the open-source world. So which
one to choose? C or C++?

C is easy to learn and it's possible to master it very quickly. Many languages (esp. C++) have been based on its ideas and syntax. I recommend starting there. Good books will have titles like "C for Dummies" or "Learn C in 21 days."

I might also add that one very useful resource on linux is the GNU libc manual. For some types of projects, you won't need anything more than this:
http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/