Help for building Social Networking Site

[Spell]

Hi,
I'm kinda new to programming and web design and I would like anyone to please tell me if there are any required programming languages I need to learn cause I'm eager to build a little social networking site for my friends and I.Please If you can help me with resources and anything you know,you've saved a mac fan.
Thankyou.

 

[tominated]

making a social network is probably one of the hardest things to make even for an experienced web developer. If you are still game, you are going to want to learn PHP and MySQL along with html and css and probably a bit of javascript.

 

[janitorC7]

throw ruby in there....
and the SQL will be really important.

But let me tell you (as a person who does social networking sites) that you are not going to want to do it from scratch, I've tried from scratch before and let me tell you that it is not worth it, try a CMS and extend it yourself such as Drupal, Joomla, dotCMS, or e107

Good Luck

 

[lurcher]

If it's just for your friends why not build a forum? Much easier

 

[tominated]

oh yeah, forgot to mention elgg. it's an open source social network platform

 

[ChicoWeb]

Um, yaaaah, you might have better luck joining an existing one 500 rather then creating from scratch.

 

[Spell]

One more thing

Thanks alot for answering my question.Since I am fortunate to have someone build one from scratch answer my question there are a few more I'd like to ask you and I hope you don't mind cause I'd really like you to mentor me through the process.
1.What are the problems the popular social networking sites have in your opinion and how do you/what do you think they can do to make the user experience more comfortable?
2.What was the experience of building one from scratch like?
3.Which particular CMS would you prescribe(I've checked out the mentioned and I prefer Joomal and Drupal) ?