Purely from my own experiences, I'd personally start at the deep-end with C. Low-level, teaches you about good coding practices (making your code re-usable, establishing or following a coding "standard" for readability etc), data types and how they are interpreted under various circumstances, bit manipulation, how variables are stored in memory etc, and gives you a strong foundation to work from when picking up other languages.
Something like an SNTP server is a great place to start once you have a better understanding of the syntax and basic programming concepts, as it deals with all of the above yet isn't difficult to understand fundamentally.
