I am a strong believer in learning C as your first language. Why? Well a number of reasons but the two main ones are 1) it teaches you about what is happening a

I am a strong believer in learning C as your first language. Why? Well a number of reasons but the two main ones are 1) it teaches you about what is happening at a lower level so you have some idea about what is happening behind the scenes of that Java code you wrote or whatever and 2) it makes you appreciate just how lucky you have it in higher level languages. However I don't think you should start writing all your programs in C! Use the right tool for the job. If that job is something C makes sense for then go for it but if you are writing a webapp I wouldn't recommend you use C (although I would if you needed a fast, native library to call from your webapp).