It really depends on your objective. If you want to be able to go out and score yourself a coding job and earn money quickly, any one of PHP, Ruby or Java woul

It really depends on your objective. If you want to be able to go out and score yourself a coding job and earn money quickly, any one of PHP, Ruby or Java would be ideal. If you want to become a good enough programmer that it becomes pretty much irrelevant which language you are asked to code in, I would recommend starting with something like Scheme, perhaps with the aid of either: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Design_Programs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Design_Programs or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation_of_Computer_Programs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation_of...