<p>This question depends on your goal and how much time you want to spend.</p>
<p>Some people here recommend ruby, i also do, sort of.</p>
<p>I’ll admit I do not know how to program in ruby (my scripting language is Perl), but you will learn Object Oriented Prog. (useful skill when moving onto other languages) and ruby should be very easy to pick up. </p>
<p>BUT what sort of job can you get paid to do with knowing ruby alone? I’m sure its mostly web development</p>
<p>so for profit, very often theres local posting at my school looking for student web developers with so-and-so experience … so basically you would need to know:
- a scripting language: PHP, Ruby , or Perl (listing in order of popularity)
- a web-framework to go along with your language, ie. ruby on rails
- most likely will have to interface with SQL database, so minimal understanding of this would be necessary</p>
<p>I think thats the fastest way for some profit programming as a student</p>