Ask HN: Confused semi-newbie programmer needs some advice.

I never really implied "language you don't know". My advice was "use a language you know and build something ambitious" (vs trying to find the ultimate "cool" language). I'll edit.

"Building something and learning from your mistakes is indeed the best way to learn,"

This is what I was trying to say, (with "something" != tiny programs). I know many people who "know" many languages(and try to know more) but haven't built anything substantial with any of them.

Today, web-enabling almost always is a requirement. People usually want access to their applications with their iphone and in the worst case (the battery just exploded, notebook lost, etc.) from a cybercafé.

Sure, you can web-enable most (business) applications with pure HTML/CSS. But if you take advantage of the power of AJAX (XMLHttpRequest), you can build GUIs with such high performance that it feels (almost) like a regular desktop application and therefore people often don’t even care about installing the available client-application on their office computers. People love it if they don’t have to install anything at all.

I would start with something like that: Imagine you’re abroad and your notebook just fell down the stairs - it’s broken. What would you like to have access to in that situation from a cybercafé. Maybe an address book? Now imagine, that the cybercafé you are into has an awfully slow connection and they charge you a fortune for every single byte that travels their connection. So, your address book should be fast as lightning, means: nothing similar should go over the wire more than once (search box, headers of your address list, pagination elements, etc.). There's nothing that can beat JavaScript in solving this problem.

I went with OpenBSD and C++ and that has taught me more about bits and bytes than the college degrees ever did.

Ditch these self-pleasuring technology forums too. They are full of people masturbating their own egos, nothing more.

First off, absolutely get a copy of _Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs_ (SICP: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/) - this is one of the best books on programming I've ever seen, and while it uses a subset of Scheme, it's really more about major concepts in CS. It's excellent. Do the exercises. It will take a while, but do the exercises.

For C, get _The ANSI C Programming Language_ by Kernighan and Ritchie ("K&R"). Harbison's _C: A Reference Manual_ is a good reference.

If you do real work in C, you might find Lua helpful - it's a C library that provides a drop-in scripting language for C projects. It's a also nice language in its own right, simple but very expressive, and stylistically somewhere between Python and Javascript. (_Programming in Lua_ by Ierusalimschy is the only book you need, though having a printed copy of the reference manual wouldn't hurt.)

Prolog is a fun language. You'll probably need to stick with it a while before it switches from being weird and novel to actually useful, though, and be prepared to be a little disappointed upfront - some of the early AI hype oversold it. It's actually pretty lousy as a theorem prover, but it has a unique programming model that is very powerful for some problems. (It will also help if you want to learn Erlang later.)

For Prolog, I like _The Art of Prolog_ by Sterling and Shapiro. It's on logic & declarative programming as a paradigm, and how well Prolog lives up to it. It's deep, and uses Prolog to teach about programming in general, much like SICP does with Scheme. Highly recommended, whether or not you use Prolog in the long run. (The newest edition is kind of expensive, but you could get by with the first edition. They fleshed out the latter 'project' chapters a lot in the second, though.)

As a reference, _Programming in Prolog_ by Clocksin & Mellish is good. I also liked _Clause & Effect_ by Clocksin; it's sort of like _The Little Schemer_, but for Prolog. _The Craft of Prolog_ by O'Keefe is great, once you're comfortable with the ideas in _The Art of Prolog_.

The thing that made data structures really make sense to me was learning OCaml. (_Developing Applications with Objective Caml_ is free online: http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/oreilly-book/) Having a garbage collector helps, and the ML family has powerful tools built-in for working with types and data structures. Doing the exercises for the first three or four chapters of that book is enough, if you're only going to use it to study data structures. (It's a great language, too, though.)

Edit: Added Lua subsection to C.