Interview with Bob Nystrom

I had the same problem. I had one tiny pocket book with less than 150 pages and Turbo C's built-in help system which was basically just trimmed down API docs. A list of header files which lead to a list of functions which lead to a short 1-2 sentence description.

But I still had a lot of fun.

I agree that the first language isn't that important, if you switch to something else shortly thereafter. However, I think it's a bit problematic if you keep using this one language exclusively for a couple of years.

Maybe BASIC wasn't such a bad idea. No one wants to stick with that and it's also rarely used in production. If you start with something like BASIC, you're forced to switch.