Richard Buckland's UNSW Computing 1 - learn with games, puzzles and friends 14 years ago
I think much of this course is also about "under the hood" - what's going on at a memory level, and fun things to do with microprocessors to get an understanding of the whole shebang. I think if you can be taught to get good grasp of the execution stack, heap memory and pointers, then teaching yourself ruby, python, or any other more abstract language would be a breeze.