Server Side Languages - make your sites dynamic

Utilising a server side language make it possible to build far more useful and interactive websites, adding shopping baskets, ecommerce, online forums, auctions, or any number of programs can make your site much more useful to the user.

There are several languages which are commonly used on the web, here are a few, and links to resources and sites where you can learn more about them.

PHP

Great language, and really easy to pick up. PHP has been around for a few years now and is recognised as one of the main internet development languages. Best of all it is completely open-source, which means there is a wealth of information and resources freely available on the web.

Take a look at the php.net website for a basic introduction to the language.

Perl

Before PHP, there was Perl... Slightly harder to learn for complete beginners but a very powerful language, ideally suited to applications which require a high level of pattern matching and server side file processing.

There are hundreds of useful sites for Perl, but my personal favourite is PerlMonks.org. Not exactly a beginners site, but a great resource site and experts online 24hours a day, always happy to answer even the most obvious of questions... a very friendly and helpful community.

The Others

There are numerous other languages out there for creating sites, such as ASP, .NET, Coldfusion, JSP. My favourites however are Perl and PHP, and I think any beginner on the web can't go far wrong learning those as basics.