Hi Turin,
and I do have a USB dongle laying around doing nothing
That is of course the solution, but IIRC the zero only has micro usb connectors so you need a USB hub to plug in a dongle (which you will need anyway to plug in the keyboard).
So for the small extra cost I would get one of the larger pi's. I have quite happily run a pi as a LAMP server ( For those who do not know LAMP = Linux Apache Mysql PHP) All of which would be good things for someone learning IT these days:
Linux: Operating System
Apache: Web server
Mysql: Database (Although personally, I prefer Postgresql)
PHP: Web scripting
The other thing I would recommend for someone learning is to have a look at Eclipse (
Eclipse - The Eclipse Foundation open source community website.) which is an open source programming tool with plugins for just about any language you need to code in.
If you want a really hard core experience you could have a look at Linux from scratch (the book is available on Amaz0n etc) which teaches how to build the operating system from source code and there are a couple of online resources aimed at doing this on the Pi (although you probably need two pis for this).
HTH
EG