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!