I'm 17 and have been into computer programing and technology stuff since i was little. i was wondering what would be a good program to start out with learning? im going to go to college to learn about all this but i want to get a head start. so any information will be helpful thanks in advance

I'd recommend anything in a book that teaches programming. When you get to the end of the book, you can come up with all kinds of things.

Go to a library and see what they have. Though some of the books will be old and out of date, they will give you some good information at least.

I would recommend studying differences between programming languages and implementing data structures in a couple of languages.

Here's a good exercise. Try to implement a singly linked list in C and in Java (Object Oriented). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_list

Try to implement a couple of different linked list operations:
** Adding a new node to the end of the list
** Adding a new node to the middle of the list
** Removing a node from the middle of the list
** Removing the start node

Once you get it all working, go ahead and try doing the same thing in both languages for doubly linked lists.

This exercise isn't very sexy, but it is important. Feel free to post some of your code or any questions that you have. (Hopefully the link that I provided gives you enough information on linked lists... if you have any general questions about it... feel free to ask).