[noblethrasher]

I don't want to be too prescriptive about which language to use but I do suggest first making useful command line programs rather than graphical interface applications. The problem with GUI apps is that you have to learn too many orthogonal concepts at once (plus a lot of GUI programming involves writing tedious boilerplate code). Python is a good modern language.

Also avoid (for now) any project that requires a relational database and instead opt for saving things to files. You'll end up learning a bunch of bad habits if you try to learn a general purpose language and an RDBMS at the same time; you might start to think that an RDBMS is the only option for storing and retrieving data even when simple reads and writes to the file system will suffice (the hacker news website does not use a relational database for instance).

Some suggestions for projects:

* Some kind of light accounting program.

* Something that reads RSS feeds, looks for keywords and notifies you of relevant links.

* Something that manages your media library.

* A TODO list (this is popular among even experienced programmers, you can easily add a GUI part later as well as graduate to using an RDBMS).

As someone else mentioned, use Stackoverflow.com. I especially enjoy helping new programmers there, my contact info is in my profile.

[sixtofour]

I agree completely with this answer, especially every word of the first paragraph.

I'm teaching programming to my 13 year old son, using Python. He's doing well with it.