I'm a Ruby on Rails guy, and the community is really excellent, so that'd be one place to start. Ruby has a very friendly syntax, so I think it's easier for a beginner to get into. Find out if there's a local Ruby users group, or PHP or Python for that matter, and start going to the meetings. Also, buy a beginners book like Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails. That's the book I started with and if you go through the whole thing you'll have pretty much all the tools you need to build a good web app.