I tend to think of Perl as a good option, although certainly not the only one. If you chose Perl, I think that the best Perl primer is probably Learning Perl, by brian d foy, Randal Schwartz, and Tom Phoenix.

However, while many people (especially beginning programmers) believe the choice of language is critical, it's not: the language is a tool, and programming is a discipline. In addition to a book about a computer language, you need to get educated about programming. For that, you're going to have to do quite a bit of hunting. One place to look may be here: The Art of Computational Science, but my background is in engineering, not computer science, and most certainly not in computer science education.