Please disregard the comments about Perl made by the person you replied to. He knows very little about it. Perl is still a very strong language that has not been overtaken by Python or Ruby in the job market: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=perl%2C+python%2C+ruby%2C+...
If you do look into Perl, start on this site: http://perl-tutorial.org It will show you the most up-to-date learning resources for Perl.
About PHP, give this blog post a read: http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de... It makes the point that while you can develop and deploy very quickly with PHP, you will make trade-offs and will have to sacrifice consistency and predictability.
Lastly, as a general advice: Look at all the languages, figure out which ones are fun for you and learn those. I say those because you will need to learn more than one. :)