If you're wondering "should I use Java or PHP", or if you want to add content to a web page and wonder which language would be best for you, post a message onto this forum and see what others advise!

This was a choice I had to make when I started learning to program two years ago.

And it's not an easy decision, I eventually went along the Perl route as I was already working as a web designer and Perl was everywhere.

No regrets about this as I now realise that programming is programming, you just learn a different syntax and its particular foibles (isn't that what cats bring up? )

jfp

There are two elements to programming - the programming techniques and principles being the first, and the language itself being the second.  If you're starting from scratch, you need to learn both.

Techniques and principles apply whatever language you're using.  You  always start with the structure of a language, variables and go through conditions and control statements and loops.  When you come on to subroutines, or procedures, of functions, or objects things do vary a little depending on things like variable scoping rules, and things will vary somewhat depending on how collections are handled in the particular language your using - have you the hashes and lists of Perl, the less flexible arrays of Java (but then you have Java.util to help you out ...) .   Finally under techniques and principle you should learn portability, maintainabily, coding style, etc.

Hand in hand with learning your first programming language, you'll be learning some of these techniques and principles.  So that you have "double the learning curve" with your first language, and then you just need to do a
"conversion" for your second.   You really know that you've learnt your second language when you code doesn't look as if it's juset been translated from your first language any more!

Graham

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