I've offered an out-of-job girl to help her study programming (with an MCSD as the ultimate goal) - and she has no progrmming knowledge. The idea is that she'll study from books and I"ll help.
Help- I need a gentle introduction to programming book, very easy, very practical, very hands-on and up to date. Optimally would be for the .Net 4.0 MS enviornment (C#,Visual Basic) but other alternaitves (Jave, Python etc.) are OK.
Head First C# is a good start.
It is C# 3.0 and uses VS 2008, though all examples should work with VS 2010 and C# 4.0.
Update:
Looks like is has been updated to C# 4.0 and VS 2010.