This article is a little old, but it hit me at just the right time. Lately, I’ve been on a binge of researching new programming languages and frameworks, now that I have so much free time and the fact that, lately, I’ve felt like I’ve fallen behind a bit after playing so much EU II and focusing on PHP for a year. In the process of playing catchup I started to feel overwhelmed - there’s so much out there - Hibernate, LINQ, CouchDB, Erlang, Ruby, Smalltalk, hey remember Scheme? SQLite, JQuery, Perl, Spring, ad nauseum.
Really nail down a few major languages and frameworks and you can work from there and google your way across the bridge when you come to it.