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[GrimFang4]

Oooh, don't rely solely on a textbook. That's what I've learned from my as yet 3 years of college. Which textbook is it? Most won't start off in a place where non-programmers can begin.

EDIT: Oh, and HTML won't make any programming language easier to use. You won't learn any programming concepts from HTML.

Carpetsmoker, I think that sometimes useful things can bog down an otherwise nice language. Ugly syntax from Awk and Sed make things worse for Perl developers and definitely for newbies. A language should not require you to separate things an extra amount and add extra comments to make anything readable.

As for Java, it is a little slow. I don't consider that a good reason to put it off though because 1) Every Java upgrade comes with a faster run-time environment, 2) Very few languages and almost no interpreted languages (like Perl) can match speed with C++ and that hasn't stopped great things from coming from each language, 3) Processor speeds have reached a level such that speed is not normally an issue unless you run stuff on old computers, and 4) Perfect speed doesn't matter very much if your application is not a video game.

I don't care much about portability, but I said that was a flaw of Java earlier. Maybe you don't understand fully what OOP is. OOP will be slower when running, but helps immensely when planning and writing a program. It can make deep concepts become intuitive. You said Java is an OO language, but all modern languages try to be. The point is that you don't have to use a complete OOP style to benefit from the inclusion of that ability in the language. Do you use objects? You had better!