Help beginning a programming career

[spaivxx]

Hi everyone, this is my first post here. I am 36, have lived my entire life never really having a real 9-5 job, and find myself in need of a new career. In my life I have made a good deal of money at times just playing music and doing odd jobs. I do have an afinity for technology and have been thinking for a very long time about becoming a programmer of some sort.

I do hava e an A+ and Network+ certification, but I am not really interested in becomming a network engineer. I have strong problem solving skills and and pretty good at learning things on my own, either from books or the net.

What I need to know is what languages are the most marketable in terms of seeking employment. Also, what tools do i need in order to begin learning to code in these languages.

thanx

[Jordan]

Hello and welcome to CC.

The most sought after languages that I see are .NET languages now. If you take a look at monster.com you will see plenty of jobs for Visual Basic, C# and C++. Choose one of these languages and get a good book on them. If you look under resources->books there is a book for each language.

I'm going to move this thread to a more suitable forum as well.

[v0id]

Welcome to CodeCall, Spaivxx!

[CygnetGames]

If you want to program big applications then you should learn about "Object Orientation". This is a style of programming that that vast majority of modern programming languages are built around.
Jordan's advice on languages seems sound.

If you want to program websites then you will need to know HTML and CSS - these are the basics of how websites are built. To do the modern fancy stuff with databases and Ajax, you will need to know a server-side language like PHP or ASP, and also possibly javascript.

As far as tools go, there are two tools that you need to program: A compiler/interpreter and a text editor.

The text editor is for writing your code, and the compiler/interpreter is for running it. A compiler takes your code, compiles it and gives you an "exe file" (if you're using windows). You then run the exe file. An interpreter runs your source code straight off. Some languages have to be compiled, some have to be interpreted - depends on the language.

Some programmers like to use their favourite text editor for all the languages they code it, and run the compiler for their language through a command prompt. This is what you used to have to do back in the "good old days" before windowing systems
You can get applications that combine a text editor with the compiler, so that you can type your code and then press a button in the application to compile/run your program. These are called IDEs (Integrated Development Environments).

If you use a Microsoft language - like the .NET ones, you have to buy an IDE from microsoft that contains a text editor, compiler and loads of other tools that do everything under the sun to try and make things easier for you. This IDE is quite expensive, but they tend to release older versions of it for free.

Hope that helps a little. Programming can seem quite daunting at first, but by far the best way to learn is to jump in at the deep end and just keep trying. There is masses of information on the internet, and forums were a real help to me when I was learning. And I still use them now when I have problems.

Good luck with it and feel free to ask any questions you may have.