New to Arduino

[system]

Under usa there's a list of local supliers.

Distributors

To my opinion most programming languages are quite similar, if you learned one it's not very hard to learn another.

There are ways to control your arduino from python if you wish.

http://code.google.com/p/pyduino/

http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1199237936