Ruby is a good choice, but be aware that Ruby is the language and Rails is a web framework for Ruby (and by no means the only one, but probably the most popular

Ruby is a good choice, but be aware that Ruby is the language and Rails is a web framework for Ruby (and by no means the only one, but probably the most popular and perhaps beginner-friendly). An alternative would be Python, which is a more or less similar language to Ruby (in the grand scheme of things), and which has its own web frameworks, such as Django, which is also very beginner-friendly. I've tried both, and found Django much easier to get into than Rails (Django's documentation is famously excellent), but other people have the exact opposite experience. Certainly in either case you should spend some time learning the language - ruby or python - before even starting with the web framework. Otherwise you'll find things very difficult. Just get to the level where you can create some simple programs to do what you want to do. Project Euler is a good collection of puzzles you can work through (you don't have to do all of them) to become literate. Start with a language tutorial. For Python this would be Dive Into Python or the official Python tutorial. For Ruby there are tutorials such as Try Ruby.