Why not just start straight into C++?

Depends what you hope to create in the future, or what you might use it for.

If you would exclusively be writing windows apps then C# would be a good place to start.  Otherwise I'd start with C++.  Starting with Visual C++ wouldn't hurt if you have good teaching material.

Personally I started with Basic but I'm sure you don't need to these days.

I would say that Haree78 said it correctly.

Why mess with the other languages if you are not going to use them.  In other words base your decision on what you want the desired outcome to be.

I cannot advise books as I only use reference books these days and google, I would say a good book will give you way more than google in learning though.  There are bad books out there too though, do your research

What I can give you is tips on learning.  Doing practical hands on learning is worth 1000s of hours of reading.  When you start going through learning material start doing the examples yourself, get them building, running and then try and extend them yourself if you think it will challenge you.  You will be surprised how much a simple example can fail when you are learning, the development environment not set up right, not understanding the type of project you should have used in a Visual Studio app etc, getting all this is only learnt from doing stuff.  Also it will make you more resourseful as a developer.  All good developers don't remember everything, they don't know how to do everything, what they have is the knowledge that they can do something with a language and they know where to look to fill in the gaps.

There are lots of good places out there on the web to help with the questions you will have as you learn such as www.codeproject.com.  Registering at these places can be worth your while.

If i was needed to choose between these 3 language, i will choose Python... Why ? Because i am a modeler and a lot of the script used in my professional 3D software are using python...

A few year ago, i will have choose Perl... more interesting script language when you are webmaster...

The syntax of Ruby is broadly similar to Perl and Python.

Whatever tutorials google can find will be my teaching material.

- Ruby : http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/

- Perl : http://www.perl.com/pub/q/documentation

- Python : http://www.python.org/doc/

Enough teaching material there for a while...

EDIT : First know what you wish create and in function of this, choose a language adaptd for the task...

Perl, Ruby, and Python are more like scripting languages.  Not good for a beginner.  Stick with C++ or Java as your first language.

Out of the 3, if you had to pick one, I'll choose perl. 

I am going to start with C++ and once I have a moderate knowledge of it I will decide what next to do.  Maybe Python or Java will be next.

For a learning language, Perl is easily the worst of the 3. It has a lot of very strange syntax. Perl can be written in very obfuscated styles. And there are dozens of ways to do any one thing in Perl (it's even part of their design philosophy). It's generally not a good idea to use it if you don't already know the basics of programming.

Python is probably the best language of the 3 for learning. However, personally, I'd suggest JavaScript (not Java); it has a pretty nice syntax that's a bit closer to C++ than most scripting languages.

No, don't do that. For learning how to program, jumping into C++ is like learning cooking by starting with a 7-course gourmet meal. Yes, you'll get it right eventually, but you're going to burn a lot of stuff along the way.

Programming is about more than syntax: programming is problem solving. Programming is about writing a series of instructions to a very stupid machine in order for it to do what you want. The essential essence of programming can be understood from any language.

C++ is not a good learning language. There are a lot of structural pitfalls you have to learn to avoid that have nothing to do with solving problems. Allocating/deallocating memory, pointers, and so on. C++ is a great language for a programmer, but it is far more complicated than you are ready to deal with.

My personal suggestion would be to start with a simple scripting language like Python or JavaScript. Once you have that down, move on to C#; it's a very good language. Once you feel comfortable with C#, then you should move on to C++.

I personally am starting with C++ and got a very helpful book which IMO does a great job of explaining the concepts. "Beginning C++ Game Programming" by Michael Dawson. Unfortunately I have been unable to get a decent book concerning Direct X programming with C++, something which is needed after that book since it only deals with running out of comand prompts. Oh, and avoid "Beginning DirectX 10 Game Programming" by Wendy Jones. It has caused me nothing but headaches. Even the example programs wouldn't compile properly.

I'd suggest python if you want to pick between the 3. Perl has an ugly syntax like almost nothing else. Ruby is something I never managed to like. The only drawback of python id indenting with an arbitrary tab = 8 spaces.

Don't start with C++. The syntax is terrible to begin with (templates, function pointers), it's got a preprocessor inherited from C which you might want to use "creatively" and gives you so many tools to shoot yourself in the foot.

The real question however should be which language is best for which task, depending on what you want to do, the language of choice will vary. I mean Haskell or LISP or ML might be more appropriate for what you want to do than any of the aforementioned languages (however unlikely that may be).

Excellent choice and stick along for the whole ride it will take to master or adapt it to your current or most probably everchanging needs.

But before you do anything else, i would highly recommend a quick splash into ASM and binary infra-structure call ops -- if only to have solid reference to the most fundamental process of machine code which EVERYONE must adhere to.

Blame my Cobol days of the 80's for this weird suggestion.

And... farewell my dear -- jmp dx,  HELLO WORLD

I'd go with perl because day to day it always usefull.  However, I'm not sure how easy it would be to pick up first.  (and not to mention learning bad habits)

I personally think anyone in engineering should learn perl early.  It's just that useful.  (almost any job you're on a pc > 50% of the time actually...)

Personnaly, I would say Python, it is more and more used by professionnals, and nonetheless it's very very quick to learn. Excellent for beginners, as many really boring aspects (which will be necessary for "bigger" language) are automaticaly managed as the memory, the pointers, the types of variables... the fact that python have an interactive console makes it unvaluable for beginners, that plus the excelent integrated debuger. And if you choose Python, once you have understand the concept of list (or array), try to learn a little C, you'll see that C is a hell to learn due to the pointer arithmetic needed to build list (dynamical i mean). Python doesn't have to be compiled, understand a compiler and all its options is not an easy task. If you choose that language, many possibilities are offer to you, you certainly won't be able make an OS, but this is rarely the goal of beginners.Making games are possible (Panda3D,Soya3D,PyOpenGl), for example i was able to make a graphical application (and not a simple "hello world" program) after 2 weeks of learning with no knowledge in programation (except conditions and loop) when I began.

Get used to concepts of variable, loop, functions, classes, methods, heritage, lists, dictionnary. And then, I agree with Zyxpsylon : learn a little asm(ASseMbly, and even how to disassembly)  before learn the C,C#,C++... well, heavier languages.

Download python 2.5 or 2.6, but not 3.0 for now, as it has almost no third party modules

python book to begin : How to think like a computer scientist with python

http://greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkCSpy/thinkCSpy.pdf

then : Dive into Python

http://python.ftp-developpez.com/cours/DiveIntoPython/fichiers/endiveintopython.pdf