Yes. it is awesome. But you need some reasonably good support, if one is to learn from scratch. Having said that, there are many, many resources online for that.
See their home page:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/
The basic operating system is Raspbian (a variant of Debian which is itself a type of Linux)
Raspbian comes with plenty of software for education, programming and general use.
The Pi uses the Python programming language as native, because it is considered good for learning. Other languages are available.
The review posted by gingejbee is a bit old now (2012), but here's some slightly more recent ones:
https://www.pcauthority.com.au/review/review-raspberry-pi-3-model-b-431595
https://www.stuff.tv/raspberry/pi-3/review