In article 
<ab0a1bc3-b23c-48b3-a721-2413e4140d33 / j22g2000hsf.googlegroups.com>,
 MRH <mauriceroman / gmail.com> wrote:

> however, I believe that it is worth asking here owing to the level of
> expertise present.

That is one way to avoid being sent to Google ;)

> learning programming and my first language.

I learned by doing, in perl, and think it worked well

> credible sources recommend either Python or Ruby, and I am personally
> leaning quite heavily toward Ruby, yet I would very much like to read

You'll have to learn more than one language anyway, so why not just 
start with one and try the other in 2 weeks time? They're not that hard.

Educationally Python might make more sense since it has less syntax (no 
blocks)

But my real advice is to find a problem you really care about, than look 
which language has the best library for it, and go with that. You won't 
learn anything from example code in books.

(I learned/wrestled PHP just to use an ID3 tag library. A while ago I 
ported all my code to ruby and use pipes to communicate with a very 
small PHP script wrapping getID3)

-- 
  Tobias Weber