A lot of programming basics can be learned from shell, python, perl, etc. That link I posted on that thread for comparisons is used in many programming languages so learning the basics of one would help you in a lot of them. That is how I taught myself pretty much. I started off doing, echo "hello world" and went from there. The thing is you gotta have patience and stick with it because it is something that takes a while to learn. Go here
http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/ and then go through some of those tutorials. You can use a lot of that in many different run time environments.