I just got A+ certified

I know you'll all scoff and regard me as a scrub, but I'm making /prog/ress towards achieving Satori. It's not much, but it's a start.

I've messed around with Ruby before, but what language would be good to take up seriously and learn in-depth? The most I've done with Ruby is make some shitty text-based games.

I'm not sure if this will impact your suggested language for me to learn, but I'm currently enrolled in CIS introduction classes for next semester, planning on getting into database administration later on. However, I want to learn how to program as a hobby.

I know I'll have to learn SQL some time in the near future, but I'm wondering if there's anything else I should take up.

In before elitist sages, conflicting suggestions, and inane comments.

What language to learn?

It depends on what you want to do. Do you want to create software for windows machines (this is getting more and more irrelevant), or do web applications (where the money is)? Mobile devices?

If you already know ruby, that's a good start for web apps. You did text based games? It's a start. Ruby is mostly widely used together with the rails framework (Ruby On Rails) for web programming.

For desktop environments you'll most probably use .Net or flex,. Often, if the application is simple enough, it's possible to just slap a web interface on top of a J2EE backend.

For mobile devices you either use Java for Android and J2ME enabled devices (there are a lot of those) or Objective-C/C++/C for iPhone. If you're not an American and/or have heard of and want to develop for the Symbian or MeeGo platform, then you'll use C++ and Qt nowadays.