That is correct, never did like getting into assembler or even too far into C. Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it... So far Ruby and Python seem to be right up my ally...and I still love PHP!

Right, I debated this exactly before posting and I had hoped that noting this was for personal and hobby use would tip everyone off that I'm not looking for anything SPECIALIZED... Thanks for your input and for your considerate tone Seriman and stox...

General purpose programming. I just want to become expert with a Language that can do utilities, small-scale applications, maybe some web work, and has a lot of libraries, like PHP, I am really liking this Language so far...

The 'right' question meh. I bow to your judgement. Next time I will endeavor to git er right. Or, mebe you could read through some of my replies to the comments and get an idea and post a USEFUL comment. Or not. You probably would answer the wrong question. Thanks anyway.

As it was, so it is. I am aware of this, and I thought most would catch when I say 'hobby' and understand me to mean that I am interested in plain general purpose coding. Nothing too fancy or too buried in any particular vein like drivers/hardware, or mathematics etc. I knew I should have said a little on that but, being my first post here, I wanted to keep it brief u know..

Awesome, more great advice, thanks and appreciation!

Finally a voice in the aethers I can hear, thank you.

As I noted in my post I never was a seasoned programmer, I was a total hack, aw hell you guys prolly don't even know what a hack is, you probably think I had an area of expertise too. I HACKED SHIT TOGETHER and got PAID! I learned whatever I needed to know to accomplish what others couldn't. I probably forgot more about the languages I've used than most 'experts' know of any single language. I couldn't possibly have listed all the languages and technologies I have done work with. But here's a sample.... BASIC, C, Pascal, Ada, COBOL, Perl, CGI, vbscript/asp, scripting (*ux shells mostly), VB, most recently PHP. I am only interested in general purpose work, utilities, hell I don't even know yet exactly where I will go with this. I was hoping for some informed guidance and expert advice but maybe slashdot isn't what it used to be...