My friend and I have both dedicated ourselves to learning the essentials of programming by June of this year from nearly no programming experience. I have done some research and have come to the conclusion that using the Python language will be the best for us, but I am open to suggestions with good reasoning behind them.

My motives for learning programming are:

1. Potential Career Path
2. to be able to create programs that can: solve problems; entertain, i.e. useful applications and games.

Online college lectures + book (which I am willing to purchase) sounds like a good combination, but I do not know which would be most suitable for me.

tl;dr: What I would like to find from the excellent people here is the following: a good, potentially best, programming course and/or book that is well structured and uses good pedagogy so that a person dedicated to learn programming may do so by following its curriculum (or use it to develop a curriculum) over the course of a few months. Thanks!

(I apologize if this type of question is not considered proper etiquette, but I haven't found a consensus on this, and would like some guidance beyond the research I've already done)