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:
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 or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation_of...