Beginner, Need help and advice!!

I just began programming a month ago. Already i'm looking for something new. I've been reading alot online about the emergence of linux and I am very interested in dropping windows. Being a college student I'm always strapped for cash, so I'm looking for a free download version of Linux. Please Help!

All llinux distros are free to download (though some want money out of you)
go to http://linuxiso.org and look for linux distros that look interesting, then go to their home page and see what features that have, etc. Most newer distros (nearly all distros) come with some development software for writting/compiling applications for most of the non microsoft programming languages (so no C# and no visual basic)

Some distros to check out are fedora, suse, slackware, and many others on that site.

You could also try knoppix, which is a linux distro that boots from the CD, so you could download it, burn it to a CD, then boot into it to play around with a lot of the linux apps that comes with it (including kdevelop, which is a good programming IDE)

Lest we forget FreeBSD;
http://www.freebsd.org
Cheers.

Read my post on the Linux forum. Linux Tutorial its labeled.

You can also try dragonflyBSD as well for a test drive of BSD systems:
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/main/

It is a 'live cd' , so there is no writing to the disk necessary for a test drive.

I prefer FreeBSD over linux at least 100 fold. It will pay to explore all options though

I tried Suse, Mandrake, and Redhat before I caught the BSD bug......

The ports collection along with port upgrade is bar none the easiest way to stay current in upgrading, using only a few commands.