11–20 of 117 posts
You can also try Lisp, but I don't have much experience with it. Lots of video lectures here: http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lec...
The argument is that there are things you can do in certain languages that you can't do with others. This is important because you're taught to think in the capabilities of the language, meaning you won't even know what you're missing in a less powerful language.
If you want to understand how the computer works, Assembly.
Do want to learn Web programming? PHP is probably the easiest programming language to learn for server-side web programming. I've read several books on PHP and looked over a bunch, and a lot are pretty good, but one of the best is this one: http://www.amazon.com/PHP-MySQL-Development-Developers-Libra...
PHP is awful.
Do want to learn Web programming? PHP is probably the easiest programming language to learn for server-side web programming. I've read several books on PHP and looked over a bunch, and a lot are pretty good, but one of the best is this one: http://www.amazon.com/PHP-MySQL-Development-Developers-Libra...
Subscribe to lots of blogs from each community. (Many of them have planet aggregators like "Planet Python" and "Planet Ruby".) Also visit local user groups, wherever your are.
Read/visit them for a while -- say a month or two. Whichever community makes you go, "wow, that's cool" -- join that community and learn the language. You can also interact with those communities via Google Groups.
Lots of people will say -- "that's easy" or "this is elegant" or "that language sucks". Feel free to ignore them.
Mainly, concentrate on learning the technology and not a programming language. Programming languages are just tools for a specific job. By technology I mean, web programming, server/client, application, embedded, etc. Each industry has it's own language and you have to know the technology to speak their language.
Best Option: Figure out what program you want to write and then find out which language you should write it in.
Objective-C and Cocoa are going to be your best bet for learning application programming, but you have to have a Mac. Otherwise, learn Java. It's somewhat simpler than C/C++ because of memory issues.
Microsoft stuff is not an option as it will teach you very very bad things.
If you want to be really hard-core, learn C++ and Assembly ( x86 architecture ). But to be even half-way decent at those will take a lot of time and a lot of reading on how to do it right.
Conclusion: Buy a Mac and learn Cocoa :)
Dare I say Java? Seriously though, Java is a good programming language to start with. You get used to C style syntax, but don't have to much with memory management and architectural differences. Plus you can use Eclipse, a great IDE, for free!