Ok ive heard it all before on how to start out to become a good programer and hacker but i still don't know what to start with. I'm taking classes at my school in programing and there pretty good like vb and c++ and im taking networking classes but the teachers don't know exactly what their talking about.

I was thinking of learning linux and unix but i'm not sure what a newbe should start out with, i've heard perl and html but i don't want to go on the wrong track and get lost. any advice would be very appreciated