[CORed]

You might want to look at curl or wget. These are not programming languages per se, but are command-line utilities for doing mass retrieval from web sites, and I believe both have some scripting capabilities, or could be called from a program written in another language. They will handle the http headers, etc. and save you some programmin. No sense reinventing the wheel; your likely to end up making it square. If you do need to write it from scracth, perl, jave, ruby and python would all be reasonalbe choices. Java would probably be the easiest to pick up if you have prior experience in C and C++.