[twunde]

For you that I'd say start with Python. It's used for software development, scripting, system administration and web development which seems to hit everything you want. I'd check out udacity's cs 101 which teaches how to build a search engine in Python as well as Google's Python class: http://code.google.com/edu/languages/google-python-class/

Since you're still in school it might be worthwhile to see if you could sneak into an intro to programming class for your last semester.

[guga31bb]

Seconding Google's Python class. It does an amazing job of covering the most common use cases in a very short class. I'm still relatively new to programming and whenever I'm writing code I invariably find myself referring back to the lessons from the class.

Note that the class is taught in 2.x so if you're running 3.x then the example code won't run. IIRC, updating the print statements for the new version was the only change required to make them work.

[fuzzypickle]

I had no idea Google even had classes