I seem to agree with Viral on something. Python is a nice language never put more than the time to read about it in books. But, I don't diss it. I say pick whatever language you feel will keep you from throwing your computer out the window. Because in the end everyone will one day want to take a hammer to there computer after a night full of coding.

Perl however is a good language to mess with. I personally recommened it. I would say that if you are going to program choose one of the two. Either Python or Perl or whatever. One of the common mistakes I see people starting out in programming doing is trying on too many languages at one time. This creates one big problem. Languages start to smear together.