Most any text editor will do at the start; a full-fledged IDE is nice once you know what you are doing, but at the start it only offers an additional layer of details to be learned. I use "leafpad" and sometimes "mousepad" as my editors but "gedit" is the one that comes with mainstream Ubuntu. I'd also suggest getting at least a starting handle on bash before diving into any lower-level languages. Nothing builds confidence so much as putting together a sequence of instructions and seeing that they do actually accomplish what you intended them to do...
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