That varies wildly between people. Thankfully for me Java was not the first computer language I came into proper contact with so I am not sure what you might respond better to.
Personally I quite like the apress beginning ? books (every one I have read), in this case "apress beginning C" for learning C but others like other things -- I have met those that get along really well with the head first (
http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920015482.do ) books where I really do not get along with them.
For assembly in the modern world I have not found anything dedicated to ARM. For X86 (and it should teach you enough that you can convert over to ARM) I do like the art of assembly
http://www.plantation-productions.com/Webster/
Once you have the basics of that down then you can look at other things. Again the 3ds is not that well documented compared to the GBA and DS so you will probably be better off looking at the reference manuals the ARM publishes. Having read a few of them now I very much doubt they were written for someone that would speak a phrase like "in a format that is interesting and applies to tasks humans can comprehend".
Still
http://blog.quirk.es/2008/12/things-you-never-wanted-to-know-about.html is worth reading and
http://www.coranac.com/tonc/text/asm.htm is always nice.
http://www.heyrick.co.uk/assembler/ is a bit more general where the previous applied more to GBA and DS stuff but it still very good.