[euroclydon]

Well, that depends on the goals of the beginner in question. We could also ask which human language is best for the beginner, but the answer would invariably be the language of the culture they live in.

I was just talking to a neighbor who's a game and graphics developer. He writes code in C/C++/C#. I was telling him about my side project, a website which sells cupcake wrapper designs. We got to talking about web development and he asked me what homework would I give him to get started. Well, after some more digging, it turns out he was most motivated by the idea of making some passive income on the web.

So, while I did email him links to RoR. I told him that learning about SEO, Keywords, and WordPress is what he should do first; that he should put up a couple of "trial balloon" sites to collect emails about his ideas, and then if he found potential customers who were interested in one of his ideas, he would have some great motivation to work through that RoR tutorial.

So, my advice is: Programming is just a tool, and unless the person is interested in programming from a pure academic standpoint, it's better to first find out what they want to do with that tool, and go from there.