Re: Suggestion for Programming Languages

> early June, and want desperately to learn as much as I can about _a_
> programming language before jumping right into Java Scripting - but which
> one will be the best for me to learn?  Once I dedicate myself to leaning
any
> one particular programming language, I intend to stick with it so I want
to
> make sure that I'm making the right choice for the aims I have in mind for
> myself.


Judi,

You need to rethink this last piece. In today's environment, no single
programming language will do all of the things that you will ever need to
do. No matter what you learn today, you will need to learn something else
tomorrow.

Fortunately, the good news is that it gets easier. A rule of thumb is that
it takes 100 hours to learn the first language, 50 to learn the second, 25
to learn the third and so on.

What language you pick first will depend on what you want to do. So, rather
than pick something at random, figure out what kinds of things make you
happy, and then find the language that lets you do those things.

If it's money you're looking for, Java is the hot language. If you want
something easy to learn, Visual Basic or VBScript are both powerful and
easy. Perl is a good choice if you want to do server side stuff. If you want
to game or operating system programming C++ is the place to be.

Something that's really useful to know, isn't exactly programming, but a
strong exposure to SQL would be an excellent foundation for going in many
different directions. SQL is the foundation of all database work, and it
will stand you in good stead... something like 70 percent of all programs
deal with some type of database manipulation, and I would wager that will
eventually be true of most web sites (i.e., 70 percent of the sites getting
the most amount of traffic will have a database backend.)


Eric Anderson

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