I'll try to help you giving you my point of view. It's a polemic subject I hope it doesn't start a flame war.<p>JavaScript is a very important language for web development. You can build web apps using it exclusivelly (called single-page applications) or running on a web server (with Node.js). I wouldn't advise any of these approaches to someone just learning web development, though. Single-page applications will required understanding and possibly implementing server APIs, and Node.js is a bit too new for beginners, or at least that's my perception.<p>Ruby (with Rails) is possibly one of the most popular choices nowadays for web development. I think the Ruby language itself is probably harder to fully grasp than others. But there's a lot of learning resources, just look for Rails books, tutorials and videos.<p>PHP is a very practical language, to extremes. It's newby-friendly and has been very popular. I have reservations about it because I think beginners are attracted to it and they don't know enough about pitfals (like, for instance, global variables) and end up creating code that can be very hard to understand, debug, maintain, not to speak keep safe against exploits.<p>Another popular option that's missing from your list is Python. It is a very good language, relatively simple to learn with less mystery than JavaScript or Ruby, for instance, and that promotes better code quality than PHP. Frameworks such as Django, web2py and Turbogears provide good foundations for web development (each in its own style). Django, for instance, has a great tutorial. And there are tons of learning resources about Python, such as <a href="http://learnpythonthehardway.org/" rel="nofollow">http://learnpythonthehardway.org/</a><p>So my advice, is, either learn enough Ruby to start playing with Rails, or try Python, possibly with Django.<p>Myself, I'm currently very happy with C# over the Microsoft ASP.NET MVC stack.<p>Good luck and feel free to ask any further questions.