What programming language should I learn ?

You can build web apps really quickly with Ruby on Rails. Among other things Rails handles all of the form/database handling which saves a ton of time.

Agreed. Pick a .NET language like C# and learn some ASP.NET to boot. You'll be able to everything you need to do in IM and you'll be highly marketable as a developer if you ever need to fill in the gaps in your income. Learn some SQL also. Most cheap hosting plans offer MySQL. From a dev perspective, SQL is SQL for the most part. Learning T-SQL (Microsoft's flavor) is a good idea to make yourself marketable if you ever need to get a job.

I realize that getting a job is not your goal, but you never know what will happen. So, a backup plan is in order.

-SDT

spite42o said:

to learn php what i want you to do is take your computer and tape it to the ceiling upside down, as well as your monitor, then your chair, but heres the catch, turn your chair around so you cant see the screen, then hop in, and start coding with php... cause thats how your brains going to feel, but oh wait theres more, spend 5 extra hours doing some mundane task...

OR

sit correctly, understand whats going on, and learn quickly... oh wait that doesnt happen with php, only with .net...

i recommend VS.net ;x you can pick your flavor of VB or C# i prefer c# it makes more sense, sure you type a few extra characters per line... but it looks prettier

Click to expand...

Guys what i'm doing is learning marketing while at the same time learning coding. If you search this "Lec 1 | MIT 6.00 Introduction to Computer Science and Programming" in google you will see the first of many MIT lectures on computer science. If you watch a couple of these a week, by the time your a Marketing guru, you should have a healthy knowledge of computer science and coding as well.

I cant agree with learning marketing and not coding, but I also understand not everyone is versed for coding. Being an experienced programmer, I still outsource because you cant write it all and even when I know exactly what they are doing it is still a nightmare a lot of the time. I don't know how you guys who outsource and can't clean it up manage, maybe its finding the right coder (PM me their contacts :])...

PHP makes perfect sense to me, and of course thats what I'd recommend as I don't know too much you cant do with it including any type of automation, mailing, scraping, etc especially since you can easily run scripts in a shell cmdline.

Python may make it easier but it wont make it easier for me ...

Glad I found this thread. Yea I learned PHP first pretty quickly. I would do PHp first. I mastered it quickly

If you have lot of spare time, learn C++.

You can do ANYTHING (application wise) with C++.

If you are planning on making standalone applications I would learn a .net language if you want some somewhat powerful but pretty easy to learn. I prefer C# but their both fine.

As for web development I would start with learning Html 5 and a bit of 4. Then learn Ajax, mysql, javascript, and possibly php if you want to. I know theres a lot of languages but most of them are fairly easy to learn (especially html) and you should be able to catch on quickly.

Good luck with whatever you choose, programming is the way to go.

I'm having trouble deciding what to use for automating tasks. I've been dabbling with rebol, php, perl, and ruby. I'm not sure which one to use. I'm quite sure that I can google source enough clues to piece-meal together this project-- It's always worked out in the past.

Anything specific for a linux user?