7 replies to this topic

[Eric83]

I'm 18 and about to go off to college (yes I know it's almost October, my school works like that), and I've decided, thanks to an xkcd comic, that I should attempt to learn Perl. With the economy and jobs being scarce, I thought it would be a great idea to teach it to myself, and my friend reinforced this by telling me that if I learn it I would be sure to get a job. He also told me, however, that Perl was only really good for printing text and data, and from what I've seen so far, this is apparently true. He listed off to me what the more popular ones are to learn, including C++, Java, Python, etc. but I'm still fairly lost as to where I should start. I know almost nothing about programming, other than what I've learned in Perl. What do you all think I should learn first and why?

[zeroradius]

From what I have seen (I'm actively seeking a job in web Dev) there are not many pearl jobs out there. Pearl does much more then printing text and "data". I have not used pearl but I know that for a web language it is rather powerful. As for your question on were to start it really depends on you;


- are you wanting to do web based programming or are you wanting to write desktop applications
- If desktop apps; what OS are you running
- what types of things are you wanting to make at the moment (diffrent languages have different strengths and weaknesses depending on what your doing)



Being as you won't be going for a job anytime soon as your in uni thou I think Java is a good place to start for desktop apps (recommend the book "Head First Java" It will teach you everything you need to know about OO and get you a foundation in Java, it assumes you can turn on a computer and thats it.) If you want web I guess you should get a foundation in HTML, Javascript, Ajax (a type of javascript you will learn AFTER learning both JS and a server side language). For the server side of it I recommend PHP because it is easy to pick up.

[Eric83]

-Hmm, well I guess I would want to do desktop apps first. somehow that seems more appealing to me.
-I'm running Windows 7.
-Honestly I'm not really sure what I want to make because I don't even know what you can make lol.

Yea I think maybe I'll start with that book "Head First Java" and go from there thanks for the recommendation.

[WingedPanther]

Perl is used for web development and network administration. Text processing is very important when processing log files, for example. Pick most any language to start with, most of them have similar core features that you need to become familiar with, regardless of what you'll be using.

[mrlemke]

Don't start with Java. It will hold your hand. Start with C.

STSC CrossTalk - Computer Science Education: Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow? - Jan 2008

[zeroradius]

Java is a good place to star Daniel. It gets you a friendly introduction without being as simple and boring as say VB. Also there are more java jobs out there then C jobs (from what I have seen in my area) thou .Net is were the jobs are booming right now, I just don't think using a WYSIWYG editor is a good place to start and wish my uni had not started me on one.

[lazycoder]

I would recommend C#. It user friendly, and you can use it for programming windows desktop applications as well as asp.net web applications. Google for Microsoft's Visual Studio Express Edition. It does have everything you need to start.

[eman ahmed]

my opinion is to start with c++ because It's an extention of c.
with c++ you will be able to doing a rich gui .
that's a useful site if you decide to learn c++
cplusplus.com
Don't began with java at any way