I'm looking for a 'career' change, I don't actually have a career at the moment since I haven't been able to find a job since I graduated with a degree in Materials Engineering. One of my loves has always been computers and programming, though I have never studied it seriously.

When I was 11 I wrote a very basic graphical 'game' using notepad and HTML, where I drew each possible position of the main character on the different 'maze' level in MSPaint, using pictures of arrows as links to a new page with the character in a new position, and various other buttons would pop up 'search box', 'press button' etc. At the time I thought this was an amazing achievement of my programming skills.

I've used a little bit of FORTRAN 90 whilst I was at university, which rekindled my interest in programming. When I was a kid I mainly used C and HTML, but only very basically as my 'game' suggests.

I want to learn a new programming language, I'm not entirely sure where I want to go with it, but the number one contender at the moment is android apps.

I'm looking at learning Java, but I've read that it's a difficult place to begin with; so I've also looked at learning Visual Basic, which I believe is also object oriented(?) but a little easier to understand? (not that I know what an object is anyway).

Any information people could give me regarding which language to learn, and if there are any good online tutorial for that language I'd really appreciate it. Some of the tutorials I've used so far are full or jargon I can't understand.

Also, I'm not afraid of maths having got an engineering degree.

Thanks in advance for any help/advice.

James