If you're new to programming, you'll probably be over-awed by the choice of books that's available, even when you've chosen the language that you'll be learning.   Which book is best for you?

If you have the luxury of a large book store nearby, go in and browse .... if not, you may be reduced to working on other people's recommendations, and ordering on line from Amazon or similar.

There are two types of books available to teach you a language - those which assume prior programming knowledge of another language, and those (rare beasts in the open source book field!) which don't.  To give you an idea, there's one particular Java book, and two Perl books, that I point people who have never programmed before towards.  I have yet to find the ideal "learn to program in ..." books for PHP and Tcl although on PHP that could simply be that I haven't had the time to survey the whole market. If you're converting from another language, you'll find the Perl and Java books excruciatingly slow  

I should perhaps add that a book such as "The Practice of Programming" by Kergihan and Pike ( http://www.wellho.net/book/0-201-61586-X.html ) is an excellent book that covers more than just writing code.   Perhaps it should be background reading for newcomers to programming, and a book which the rest of us pick up from time to time to remind us of design aspects such as clarity, robustness, expandability and maintainability.

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