Beta-guy, here's some information about the C book I recommend. (
http://knking.com/books/c2/index.html). But since programming is new to you, I'm hoping your first programming language will be much higher-level than C. A much-higher-level language will help you focus largely on the problem you're trying to solve. Unfortunately, if you're like me, C would tempt you to think too much about minute details and too much about how to make tiny changes that won't speed up your program much. I'd try Python.
Or, if you want to join geekdom
, try
How to Design Programs: An Introduction to Programming and Computing by Mathias Felleisen, Robert Bruce Findler, Matthew Flatt, and Shiram Krishnamurthi. Although they wrote it for high school students, professional programmers learn a lot from it, too.
Why do I say "geekdom?" Because that book will teach you the Scheme programming language instead of C. Amazon.com sells the current edition of
How to Design Programs. An older edition is online, too, at (
http://htdp.org/). Many programming language books tell you a lot about how to use a programming language and too little about how to design programs. From chapter one on, the book about Scheme helps you do both.