I'm in the same boat. I'm a communication major, but I discovered Unix via Mac OS X, and I was hooked. Like a lot of geeks, however, I programmed in BASIC as a

I'm in the same boat. I'm a communication major, but I discovered Unix via Mac OS X, and I was hooked. Like a lot of geeks, however, I programmed in BASIC as a kid. First, I'd start off with an open source Unix, probably Ubuntu if you don't have one installed already. Just learning to work the shell will give you some useful programming experience. Then I would start learning Python.