Learning a new programming language is great for two reasons: 
<ol>
<li>It expands your mind. Your brain gets exercise when it’s forced to think in new ways. </li>
<li>If you’re building something big, take the time to learn the best tool for the problem at hand.</li>
</ol>
I learned this the hard way when building Zyked.com. At the time, ASP (the old one, not .NET) was all I knew. I spent almost a year slowly building a large site, before hitting a wall when I came to AJAX stuff and Facebook integration. I then learned Ruby on Rails and rebuilt the site in 1/10th of the original time. 
Learning to be productive in a new language, framework, or tool rarely takes more than two weeks. It’s worth it.
<h2 id="object-oriented-languages">Object-Oriented Languages</h2>
Programming for total beginners: <a href="http://www.codecademy.com">http://www.codecademy.com</a> (JavaScript)
Python: <a href="http://people.csail.mit.edu/pgbovine/python/">http://people.csail.mit.edu/pgbovine/python/</a>
Ruby: <a href="http://tryruby.org">http://tryruby.org</a>
<h2 id="functional-languages">Functional Languages</h2>
Functional languages are hyped right now because they scale better across multiple processors.
Clojure (like LISP):
<ul>
<li>Learning: <a href="http://java.ociweb.com/mark/clojure/article.html">http://java.ociweb.com/mark/clojure/article.html</a> </li>
<li>Learning quiz game: <a href="http://www.4clojure.com">http://www.4clojure.com</a></li>
</ul>
See also: Haskell, Erlang

Learning a new programming language is great for two reasons:  
	It expands your mind. Your brain gets exercise when it’s forced to think in new ways.  
	If you’re building something big, take the ti

You should learn a new programming language!

Object-Oriented Languages

Functional Languages