best programming language for a programming book?
mbrubeck: Since you know Ruby, you might consider writing examples in Sinatra.  Compared to e.g. Rails or Merb, it's less of a framework and more of a simple DSL for building web sites/services.  It really gets out of the way and keeps the focus on the content and logic.  But the newbie web developer who learns Sinatra will have a lot that's still useful if they move on to a full-stack framework like Rails or Django (for example, templating and database models are basically the same).