Where to begin?

I've always wanted to learn programming/scripting---but I've never really had the time or gave myself the push to do it.

But a need has arisen, and I'd like to learn some scripting/programming to meet that need.

It'll have to be a 'in my spare time' project, but I read a lot of forums and I email a lot of the simple text only 'printable' web pages from web newspapers to my email account for perusal later.

I'd like to automate this. Build something that crawls through urls that I give it, seperates out the fluff and presents some nice, small (storage size) text pages for reading on my palm, or for printing.

What language would you suggest I learn? I read through some pythos tutorials six months ago, but learning for the heck of learning did nothing for me. I fell asleep after watching a program count to 99.

I want to get to work and build something useful. Got any suggestions?

Well, not to dissuade you, but the functionality you're describing could be a fairly complicated endeavour to start with if I understand it right. However, if you really are interested in learning to program, I humbly reccomend Perl for that particular job you mentioned. As for where to start learning Perl, you'll want to grab the book "Learning Perl" from O'Reilly. If you're a glutton for pain, you can start out with "Programming Perl 4th Edition" from O'Reilly, but, I would reccomend you get that AFTER you've had a comfortable, easy introduction to the language from the first book.