Language for stenography

So, I know there have been a few forum topics about ruby and python, but here is another one.

I am going to be taking an independent course in stenography at school, and was curious as to what language I should be using. Since this is an independent course, I can choose the language, libraries, tutorials, books etc. I have heard that both ruby and python are fairly nice for working with stenography, but I don't know about other languages. My biggest problem is finding out what language has the better libraries and support for image manipulation. Any thoughts on these two, or other languages.

I am already familiar with java, vb.net, and c++ (along with many web based languages), so I was hoping to find something similar to what I already know, but that isn't a high priority.

Also, I will be doing some work with cryptography, and encryption/decryption. Would there be one magic language that would suite those topics, plus stenography?

Thanks in advance for any help.

stenography, i'd personally look at ruby or python. PHP does have the excellent GD lib though.

Cryptography, your life will become much easier under PERL (including a couple of encryption modules, adding 10 lines of code, you'll have a good encryption program in no time). Ruby isn't too shabby either, but it's not got quite as many prebuilt modules to tap into

Are you looking for stenography or steganography? C or C++ is a good choice for steganography as well and both support a variety of imaging libraries (The first article I read on steganography was a Dr. Dobbs Journal article written in C). By the way, perl, python and ruby also have interfaces to libgd and imagemagick. It is not the language, but the algorithm and techniques that are more important IMHO.

Also, it is not necessary to use images to hide data. You could also hide data in source code. For instance, I could hide information in a HTML page by using whitespace to encode a message . Then, there's the old classic writing your message using invisible ink (or lemon juice) and then writing a normal looking letter using ink on the same page. That's Steganography too.

ah, stegangraphy makes more sense.

also I didn't realize that multiple languages could interface witht he same libraries.

this is good information for me.

and I did realize that there are multiple ways to hide data, but my main focus was with images within images, and digital water marks.