Languages? No, not French.

[Jam-ez]

Hi,

So, I've always been obsessed with learning a language, such as PHP, C++, HTML, and many more. However, I can't quite figure out which one I should actually take up. There's a whole bunch of them out there, and how do you choose which one is for you? Is it a case of simple, medium and hard, or is it "what do you want to do?", "who do you want to be" etc?

Any advice on what languages are recommended, and which are not? Or any information about which will be useful in the future and which won't (I'm 14 now so think ahead, 4-10 years).

Please try not to give biased opinions, say if you learn php, php is the best, although you can say that if you can justify why. :)

If you do wish to enquire more about me (as this may help you in some way), don't be afraid to ask.

Thanks,
Jam-ez.

[Decode]

You should start off by learning HTML, you need to know the basics of it to do any other web based language.

[Jaysun]

HTML > xHTML > CSS > Javascript > PHP (Not sure)

[Excellent2]

HTML > xHTML > CSS > Javascript > PHP (Not sure)PHP before Javascript is my preference.

[Awfy]

HTML and CSS first, because with these languages you get to achieve so much more when you're first starting out plus you can combine them with nearly any other web based language to build up the visual page. I've been coding for 8 strong years now and I haven't once needed to move onto Javascript or PHP. My only coding abilities needed have been HTML and CSS :)

[Jam-ez]

Thanks for the replies, I'll +rep you all, but what about other languages, not just web based ones?

[Excellent2]

Perhaps you should stop worrying about other coding languages and focus on learning HTML, CSS first :P

[L?KE]

Non-web based applications require things like C++ and C# etc.

Lolol at my school we do pascal and delphi for a level :P

[Awfy]

Even with non-web based languages it sometimes helps to know some HTML as it generally has a structure which you can put into your other forms of coding. Helps a lot with how you should layout and expect from your code.

[Excellent2]

Yeah I mean there is no point rushing into PHP because to make it show up on a page neatly you need to have knowledge of HTML. CSS is more about styling everything so you should learn that too.

First of all grab some knowledge of html from places like www.w3schools.com - You can also learn about CSS from there too. One tip I'd give to you is if you start out with table coding, once you've mastered it go onto learn divs as it will variate your code and give you a different perspective :)

[HotelUser]

HTML > CSS > Javascript > PHP

This order because if you know HTML, CSS and Javascript then you'll already know a lot about web designing, and then after learning PHP you'll be able to design great looking scripts.

For tutorials on all of these languages and more: http://w3schools.com

[Jam-ez]

Thanks for all the advice, I'll +rep anyone I didn't before. :)

[CS-dude]

Hey,

This one really comes down to what your planning to use the programming for.

If web design / development is what your after, html and css are where you need to start, since both JavaScript and php require a good knowledge of html from the beginning.

Now if more desktop languages are what your after, Java is a good starting place for object oriented languages. There's plenty of free IDE's, tutorials and its well documented.
Alternatively, Microsoft just released Phrogram (http://phrogram.com/), its basically a very simple .net based programming language aimed at kids. This means it should be very easy to pick up. Once you have that down, try moving on to VB.net or another more fully featured languages.

Once you learn one language, picking up a second becomes very easy. So don't think because you choose one option, you wont be able to do the lot eventually :)

CS-Dude

[Blinger1]

Lolol at my school we do pascal and delphi for a level :P
We did Visual Basic .NET :(