If you have little to no coding experience, leave Java out of the mix for now. I "restarted" my programming skills about 6 years ago with Python and absolutely love it. (And have since added C, java, javascript and of course conversant in HTML, CSS, etc) I know nothing of Ruby other than it has a following as devoted as Python. Look at the wikipedia entries for each language and see what "feels" more comfortable to you. If you find python "feels" best, and you're relatively new to programming... take a look at "Python Programming" by John Zelle (at Amazon, check out the reviews).