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It all depends on what type of system you're going to develop for.... For Windows I would suggest starting to learn Visual Basic .NET only to start off with, don't take it very far. Just to the point that you understand about data types, strings, classes and things like that. Then try either Python or C# however I suggest you learn the entire language and practise with them a lot as they are very useful languages. Then finally learn C++. For Linux I suggest that you start with either Perl, Python or Ruby (I personally like Python) and learn it proficiently. Then move onto something like C# or Java (I personally like C#), and finally learn straight C as most programs in the Linux environment are built in C and it's a fantastic language. For Mac (better not be *grrr*) learn AppleScript and then Objective-C, apart from that don't even bother programming on a Mac, apart from web-dev in which case learn HTML (which is a markup language and not a programming language), also learn XML (again another markup language), and then learn PHP or JSP.

You should also not only use cryptography but steganography as well as this will hide the encrypted partition of the USB. This means that even if the USB is stolen and the thief is not technologically retarded it's more unlikely that he/she will even realise that their is an encrypted partition on the USB. The only problem you've got is that you're using a password to protect a password. Which is stupid cause if the password you used to encrypt your system password with is a lot less secure then it may be possible to recover the encryption password and thus obtain your system password. The best thing todo is just have a good system password that is easy to remember and very, very hard to brute force.

I reckon Python would be better to learn. It's a fantastic language and it's syntax isn't too hard to get a grip on, although you do miss braces and semi-colons ;) Personally I find Ruby a little too much like Python. Visual C++ is just Visual C++, it can be useful but it's still just Visual C++. HTML 5 is awesome but it's still a markup language and not a programming language. BATCH would be closer to programming than HTML 5. Also you should learn Object Oriented coding but don't adhere to it. Personally I don't find it useful unless you're going to program things that need polymorphism and encapsulation.

When I first started learning PHP I used WAMP, which is very similar to XAMPP however from a beginners point of view I reckon WAMP is easier to configure. If you've done Web-Dev stuff before then XAMPP would be better but if you're started Web-Dev for the first time then I would suggest WAMP. It also depends on what type of machine you're going to be writing your code. If you're going to be writing code on a Linux box then you'll either have the choice of LAMPP (the same as XAMPP) or installing the seperate parts yourself which can be tricky for a first time user. Personally I reccomend that you try an all-in-one solution to begin with and then when you become more proficient you could even try compiling PHP with FastCGI and things like that. Also don't forget that there is more than one webserver out there, don't stick to Apache for life.

vxchaos.official.ws A fantastic site where you can find older exploits, virii source code, e-books and lots more.