Never heard of Ruby? Its that new hot language that is at the tipping point of blowing away all existing languages;-)
Read about it at http://ruby-lang.org, and of course don’t forget the great Ruby on Rails framework at http://www.rubyonrails.org that lets you build a data driven, Ajax style web site garanteed under 15 minutes. And the book “Agile web development with Rails” is absolutely a great reading.
To get a touch of the language without installing the whole shabang and even get an interactive training (Ajax style), check out http://tryruby.hobix.com/. It is really cool! (Uhhh… needs Firefox by the way, sorry!) <== UPDATE: Problem is solved, works on IE and Safari now, but Opera seems to be a problem!! Great work!!