Visual Basic is a programming language created by Microsoft. It is particularly good at writing programs that have a graphical user interface since VB (as it's known) comes with a variety of ready-made dialog boxes, check boxes, text-entry areas, etc.
The VB programming language is (compared to most other programming languages) relatively easy to learn and to understand. You design a program by creating the forms and dialog boxes the user will encounter. You add elements to those forms and boxes by choosing from a palette of tools and positioning them where you want. Then, of course, you have to program the forms and boxes to do what you want. For example, you might design a form that lets a user choose a text file to be turned into upper case. VB makes it pretty easy to create the form the user would use to browse to the file she wants to uppercase. But then you have to write the programming code that opens the file, gets the text, uppercases it, and closes the file.
Note, though, that a few years ago, Microsoft introduced its latest version of VB, called VB.net. It is much much harder to learn and understand. VB6 is the version before VB.net and is a far better choice for a beginning programmer.
There are many sites that have VB tutorials. In addition, many sites answer common - and not so common - questions about VB, which also makes it a good choice for a beginner. Here is one tutorial: http://theopensourcery.com/vb01tut.htm
