trijohn:
I'm a college student, and I'm interested in learning basic programming.
While Arduinos are awesome fun (I wish they had thoose when I went to school, maybe I had gone to class then) I don't get if you just want to learn to program where I would say that it would be more usefull to get a book on any programming language really or if you acctually want the hardware part that the Arduino gives you.
(Acctually you might want to pick up a book on C/C++ too anyway)