I'd disagree for someone unfamiliar with programming as the author seems to be. Ruby isn't a good starter language, IMO. It has a bit too much magic for beginners for my taste. It's absorbed a bit too much from Perl in that it's a lot easier to write than to read. When people are first learning a language, I'd suggest a language that has a little more structure to it than Ruby. That's why I suggested Python and Django.

I really don't have anything against Ruby and Rails. I really like the Rails framework and there's a lot of great stuff there. I just don't think that Ruby is a best first language to learn.