but I'd actually be comfortable with most of the basic scripting languages.
The real question is what you're planning to use for a text. If you find a text you like, and it does examples in a half-way reasonable language, then I'd use that language.
If this was a slightly more advanced group, I might suggest [link|http://www.modperl.com/perl_networking/|Network Programming with Perl] as a reference, but I suspect that that's more in depth than you want to go.
Cheers,
Ben