I tend to think of Perl as a good option, although certainly not the only one. If you chose Perl, I think that the best Perl primer is probably Learning Perl, by brian d foy, Randal Schwartz, and Tom Phoenix.

However, while many people (especially beginning programmers) believe the choice of language is critical, it's not: the language is a tool, and programming is a discipline. In addition to a book about a computer language, you need to get educated about programming. For that, you're going to have to do quite a bit of hunting. One place to look may be here: The Art of Computational Science, but my background is in engineering, not computer science, and most certainly not in computer science education.

The canonical book for learning Perl is Learning Perl (the Llama). You may also find the Tutorials section and, (just a very little) later on, the Seekers of Perl Wisdom section (right here in fact) are very useful resources for learning.

Hi dude,
indeed what you're trying to do is the most fundamental on what you want to learn.
If you're a computer science grad or wannabe, then learning OOP through C++ should really be helpful to provide u a solid foundation.

If you're an engineer or have to manipulate a lot of data, doing a lot of background stuff, then perl is for you.

If you want to do window type programming, either choose c# or java, which language is totally a matter of your personal choice :)
Or if you just want to program for fun, maybe vb.net? it's syntax is easier to learn. and you can still leverage on the powerful .net framework
~that's just my two cents~

If, however, you're interested in making web-based applications, Perl is an excellent choice. The last chapter of Learning Perl covers CGI programming, which is the fundamental method of creating web-based applications in Perl, and there are many other books (as well as tutorials here on perlmonks) covering CGI for once you're comfortable with the basics of the language.