Not only Ruby is a great programming/ scripting language to do your daily jobs or to automate your testing tasks, also Perl is.
Find a free (GNU Free Documentation Licence) Perl training as HTML or PDF on the homepage of Greg London
Also Python is a great language, and a lot of free books & tutorials are existing to learn it, e.g. Learn Python The Hard Way by Zed A. Shaw, which can be downloaded as PDF. But please be aware that this is a book for absolute programming beginners!
While reading chapter 18 of „Agile Testing“ the term „rubber ducking“ was mentioned.
Two weeks ago, at work we had the kick-off-session for a „Book Study Group“.
In a former „book swashing session“ facilitated by Deborah Preuss and Sebastian Lang, it came out that we want to start with „Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams“ by Lisa Crispin & Janet Gregory or with „Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship“ by Robert C. Martin.
Why should (agile) testers have programming skills? They are testers, not programmers. Why to know how to code, if it isn’t your job to do so?