Now THAT'S funny.

http://www.research.att.com/~bs/bs_faq.html#IEEE (It's a hoax)

That said, I HATE C++, it *IS* a God-awful language. At least with C you could remember the entire command set with ease, no need for a reference tome under your left hand.
I'm glad that all the programming I ever have to do is small snippets of C code and the occasional bit of assembler. I have been approached to do some programming in C++, with a pretty good salary - I ran, screaming.
Seriously, I'd rather write in machine code - raw hex - than C++ I hate it that much.
</opinion rant>

Yes. I HATE C++  too. is is an awful language for newbies, and it is also very cryptic ( it is an assembly level language). I have to admit, i dabbled in it for a while then got very tired of doing it.

I am not sure that you should start at an either/or place regarding learning operating systems and programming.  In order to figure out how things work together, it helps to pick a task that you want to accomplish, and then work towards writing something that will accomplish it.  An example might be figuring out how to write a perl script that will determine if logins are working on your web page.  To do this, you might start out by figuring out enough sys admin to install apache, configure it along with php and from there write a simple script that  will load a password file from a directory and allow login attempts based off of that information.  Once you have that working, break out some perl and start off with hello world and then work towards creating a perl LWP page that will log into the page and then send an email if you can't login.  Figure out how to add that script to cron to run automatically.  Once you've got a feeling for how some of this stuff works, and have gotten some basic scripting down, then there are plenty of games to play online.  A while back, I played around at http://www.hackthissite.org/ to get a feeling for what types of things you might encounter, and they have forums that will help you through it if you have trouble.  Figure out what is broken, but more importantly, figure out how you might fix it if it were you.  As far as Pen Testing goes, if you can't tell people how to fix the things that are broken, then you won't be nearly as useful.  As you start exploring, you will start running into tools to figure out how to diagnose problems, like using nmap to figure out what services your box has exposed to the outside, and then when you find ports that you aren't sure why they are there, figuring out how to use netstat to determine why they are there, and then digging further.  Now that VM's are so prevalent, play as much as you can, if you break it no big deal, figure out how to fix it, you'll learn a lot more that way anyway.  As far as I'm concerned, programming languages, applications, and operating systems are all tools that you use to get your job done.  Pick tasks that you want to accomplish to get to know your environment, and once you have a feeling for your environment then you can start figuring out how to make that environment do things that it may not have been intended to do, and that's when the fun starts   Anyway, just my opinion, but I hope that this at least gives you some ideas if it doesn't give you a good starting point.

Excellent post, Apollo, and welcome to EH-Net.

Don