You may want to take a serious look at: "How to Design Programs":
http://htdp.org/
It provides explicit support and scaffolds for learning how to program using the DrScheme IDE. (Coincidently, the underlying engine behind DrScheme is the same technology that's powering the prototype arc0 compiler.)
DrScheme supports multiple "teaching" languages with slightly less power than full-on Scheme. This sounds weird at first, but the purpose about using a more limited language is to provide excellent error messages while you're learning. i.e. if you're just beginning to learn how to write functions, then passing around functions as first-class arguments may not be what you intend. So the system, in Beginner level, will treat this as a syntax error with a good explanation of what's going on.
Once you have a good enough understanding of programming, you can graduate to the full "Pretty Big" language, or go into arc or whatever you want.
