I think that's a question of faith and about personal preference. If you search in your favorite search engine for the very same questions you will get many different answers. I am quite sure, that here it will be no different. It also depends on where you want to go with it and what you would like to achieve with it later.

Learning or beginning with a scripting language would be a good idea in my opinion, as it should demonstrate you most of the basic and some advanced topics, such as data types, loops, exception handling etc. which are similar to other programming languages as well.

If you are more interested to begin with a programming language, I would recommend C. It is not too hard to learn in my opinion, especially as you have stated that you already have a good foundation. C is a very strong language, works on most platforms, is used a lot in the exploiting field and should also help you later on, if you would like to go into oop (in regards to c++).

Once you have understood the concepts behind programming, it hardly matters which programming language you use as they are mostly the same. Then it is only about syntax and implementation.

Ar, you are right, guess I didn't catch the word 'lack'. Though I think C would be a good starting point anyway.

In my first response to this questions I also wrote a few sentences about assembler, as I really think it is good to know for many areas in ethical hacking, but as the initial question was about a beginning language, I removed it. I can fully agree with you here, KamiCrazy, asm is great to know for many reasons.

@zeroflaw - It may just be me man - but I think ruby would be a bit of a possible overkill on a beginner. I look at some ruby code and go, 'woah'

I've taken several programming classes and the one's I consider most beginner friendly is python. I also found VB.NET beginner friendly (it's probably out of the question here?).

I found python docs to be a good source for information just for starting out - I used it a lot in the class.
http://docs.python.org/3.1/tutorial/index.html

If you have the money for a couple books, maybe someone may back me up in saying I've heard some positives for Gray Hat Python Programming For Hackers & Reverse Engineers.

http://www.amazon.com/Gray-Hat-Python-Programming-Engineers/dp/1593271921

This one also seems affordable:

Python For Dummies, 2006

I wouldn't recommend Gray Hat Python: Python Programming for Hackers and Reverse Engineers as a book to pick up to learn basic programming. It is a good read in my opinion, but not for a beginner.

I agree with you though that Python is a good language to start with.

thanks for the links! this seems as a pretty good starting point. i picked up shell scripting first to get back in the game, after that i will get back into either perl or python.

Gray Hat Python - great book, just not as a first step / starter.

Just time, Hacking for Dummies and Hacking the Next Generation to get through first.

And I can always get python books through my Safari account (How I got GrayHat Python).