General programming resources

So Im a bit new to things, and I was wondering if people in the IGOR community had any solid, but general or generalisable, resources for basic programming concepts. Especially in regards to the broader concepts that are, in themselves, applicable to many languages.

Things like hierarchy and structure efficiency, common algorithm optimisations, memory useage and minimisation, etc..

Ive been poking around quite a bit on ye olde interwebbes, but it is a bit overwhelming and most of the hits are very language specific (and without knowing better, its hard to tell if they can be then generalised).

If you have any good online resources (or even books to recommend), put 'em here. Im sure I cant be the only one who could make use of them.

thanks,
-daggaz