Guys really? I mean, I'd make him consider HTML5/JS if I were you, and since he has MySQL/PHP experience I'd figure he has some webdev experience. C, C++, Java is all too complex for a starter IMHO.

Well, we don't know if he wants to do web based games, which is why I was curious about what platforms he was targeting. If he wants to write native code for a platform, then HTML/JS are going to be poor choices.

Secondly, Java is often used as a language for teaching beginners (and the OP isn't even a beginner programmer), so can hardly be considered too complex. Anybody who has experience with programming paradigms and techniques should be able to pick up the three languages you mentioned without a lot of difficulty.

If you are absolutely just getting started, here is a really basic javascript example game. If you just view the source code, and copy and paste it into your text editor, you will be able to look at it and figure out what it does. You can make changes to the code, and then just save and view the file in your internet browser to see the effects. Whatever language you use, the code will basically function more or less like that example.

If you plan to learn Rails someday so that you can earn lots of money as a Rails developer, then you might try the Gosu gem, which runs on Ruby. Installing Ruby is really easy and so is installing Gosu. In my opinion, Ruby-based Gosu is the easiest programming language/platform to learn out of all languages and platforms. Boogeyman19946's comments are spot on. Once you learn to use Ruby, all the other programming languages will make more sense. There is also a C++ version of Gosu, which has faster processing speed, but is not as easy to learn.

Just for the sake of comparison, here is the same game as the javascript example, written in Ruby:

require 'chingu'
include Gosu
class Game < Chingu::Window
  def initialize
    super(600,400,false)
    self.caption = "Simple Game"
    self.input = [:holding_left, :holding_right, :holding_up, :holding_down, :esc]
    @player = Chingu::GameObject.create(:image => Image["face.png"], :x => 30, :y => 70)
  end
  def holding_left;   @player.x -= 3;  puts "left";   end
  def holding_right;  @player.x += 3;  puts "right";  end
  def holding_up;     @player.y -= 3;  puts "up";     end
  def holding_down;   @player.y += 3;  puts "down";   end
  def esc;            exit;                           end
end
Game.new.show