Alfred posts about an article at http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2016415,00.asp which is a very good article. Oddly enough, my classroom website is written in PHP, and I do recommend it to my Java students as the next thing they need to learn.
I also teach Visual Basic, and have taught some form of basic for 14 years.
AJAX is on my list to learn, as is Ruby, but I haven’t had a chance, the others I have written enough code in each one to get something working I wanted working.
I would stress also that Assembly Language is something ALL Programmers need at some point. I’ve taken it at the college level twice, and it really helps you to understand what is going on under the hood, and I think it makes you a better programmer.