I learned C when I was 11, an uncle gave me a book as dense as a dictionary covering all the aspects of the language, as well as algorithms. He called it "The Bible".

For 1 year I woke up at 5:00am every saturday and sunday, to use the only computer we had at home before other people were up so I could do every single exercise of the book (there was about 20 per chapter, 10 first trivial, and the rest were small projects of increasing difficulty).

I consider that this experience is what made me the best programming student even at college, and an excellent developer when in the workplace. The lessons I learned from C are still priceless even though I mainly develop in managed and OOP languages today.

This will teach you basics that will never fade, there're certain Google searches you will never make again.

The important thing when you start is to know how a computer works, and how lines of code are interpreted and executed by the computer, as well as how to express and solve real world problems with computer instructions. You don't need to know every detail, but the less magic it feels, the better.