It's been a while since I've done any offline programming so I haven't tried many new languages myself yet but I've heard that both Visual Basic and Python are quite user friendly and you can find lots of free tutorials on the net and there are also a few good "for dummies" books out there..
Rebol is another programming language that I've heard is very easy for beginners, but I've never seen or tried it myself so I have really no idea if that's correct or not...
http://www.rebol.com/
A tutorial (of some sort):
http://musiclessonz.com/rebol_tutorial.html
And you also have Kids Programming Language - KPL..
http://www.kidsprogramminglanguage.com/
(it's really not just for kids so this could actually be something for programming newbies as well..)