With all this talk of dynamic scripting languages, I just wanted to mention Perl. We also have a powerful framework - http://www.catalystframework.org/ http://

With all this talk of dynamic scripting languages, I just wanted to mention Perl. We also have a powerful framework - http://www.catalystframework.org/ http://www.catalystframework.org/ and there's an excellent book: "The Definitive Guide to Catalyst". There's also a great, freely available, introductory Perl book: http://www.onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/index.html http://www.onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/index.html. For any framework you pick up you'll need some grounding in the language as whole. Many would consider Perl to be not as shiny and modern as Ruby or Python but we keep stealing their good ideas anyway: * Rack/WSGI -> Plack. * RVM -> Perlbrew. * Bundler -> Carton. * Sinatra -> Dancer. Not to mention the good ideas emanating from the Perl community itself: * A strong commitment to testing, which has lead to a central repository for cross-platform test reports for every Perl library released http://static.cpantesters.org/ http://static.cpantesters.org/ * An advanced, powerful object system http://www.iinteractive.com/moose/ http://www.iinteractive.com/moose/ Much as I enjoy programming Perl, there's not really a bad choice between: Perl, Python, PHP or Ruby. Some would argue that the inconsistencies of PHP make it more difficult to learn but I'd argue that if you're on a Windows platform it's probably the best choice. The ubiquity of cheap PHP hosting is another benefit for a beginner. Try learning enough to write a simple script in each of Perl, PHP, Python or Ruby. Then a pick a framework for the language you felt most comfortable with.