I think for most people who are getting started in web development, it is best to focus on a something like Word Press, written in PHP (with CSS, JS etc), where hundreds, maybe thousands, plugins are available.

It is much easiler to build an e-commerce shopping cart or recruitment site (as the original poster requested) with Word Press and if the developer wants to go deeper they can easily write PHP, JS, CSS extensions.

Word Press is an amazing free applications with myriad extensions for functionality and themes for the presentation layer. It is best not to reinvent the wheel and to learn by modifying existing code rather than starting from zero. I build a lot of WP sites for friends and all of them are very happy with them. A few go further and actually learn basic HTML, CSS and then on to PHP and JS. All are amazed at the power of WP for a web site.

So, just because someone asked about "language" does not mean we ignore the obvious frameworks and do not share our experiences with actual web development.

As a side note, we recently started a thread/poll asking who on the site actually develops or administers a web site. It is one thing to "talk about it" and another to actually "do it".... folks who actually "do it" tend to use CMS frameworks like WordPress and modify as required. Very few start from scratch.