How can a student with no experience in programming get started in the programming world?

Before being worry about how many languages you will learn or the purpose of them, you have to understand, in a nutshell, what's related to a program creation. Programs, in general, are made to solve one or more problems in a computional way. For instance, a calculator is a program that solve the problem of calculating manually numbers. Due to the fact that we - programmers - need to talk to a machine, we use codes with steps very defined to explain what we want. That code are written using rules related to the language that we choose, but our thinking is regardless of the language. Therefore, if you know how to solve the problem, the language is chosen by your willingness and knowledge in that language. Thus, I recommend you look for a programming course and materials about algorithm. Here, you will develop your capable of computacional thinking. After solving a lot of questions/doubts/problems, search about what area in programming you are interested - desktop, mobile, web, circuits, etc. Then, search about the languages involved and try to create small applications - just to learn. Below, I list some of the languages: 1) Desktop - Java, Python, C, etc. 2) Web - Java, PHP, Ruby, Python, .NET, etc 3) Mobile - ObjectiveC, Java. 4) Circuits - Python, C, Java. Throughout the learning you will find what you like. Don't worry. The last point is about the learning. In the beginning, it will seem to be the hardest thing in the World but don't give up. In time you will understand some concepts that seems to be hard.