What language to learn?

MONOLITH

MONOLITH

MONOLITH

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Joined
3 May 2007
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50
Hi,

I know this type of thread has cropped up before but I wanted to ask with regard to my specific specification. I currently want to get into a bit of web development and was wondering what the best languages to learn are.

I've read some articles regarding the 'iPad' and Jobbs ranting on about the instability of flash/actionscript and him stating that HTML 5 will eradicate the need for flash and other media technologies. So is there any point on me learning actionscript/java if these technologies are going to lose out to HTML5?

In the past I have touched on Java and mainly worked in C++. The latter doesn't interest me much so wanted to do something a bit more creative. However I don't want to invest time in a language that will be obsolete.

My understanding is that obviously I will need HTML and CSS. Should I learn ASP? Ajax? Am I right in thinking those languages are for dynamic content?

Your thoughts would be much appreciated. Thanks.
 
You're right about HTML and CSS. That's what you'll be sending down to the user's browser. The question is how you're dynamically generating that HTML and CSS on your server.

Even if Apple weren't doing their best to kill it off, Flash/ActionScript is pretty lame anyway.

If you're starting from scratch, could you go the 'modern' route and learn a language like Ruby and use one of its web development frameworks (Rails, Sinatra, ...). Alternatives are PHP, ASP.NET, Python (with web framework), ...

You probably know this already, but remember that Java and Javascript are entirely unrelated. Javascript was unfortunately named.
 
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Yes, remember that a language like java is not really what you use for your web page development. You use these languages if you want to write an application that will sit behind a web page. The web page will have its own implementation and some common ones to use with java will be jsp's or jsf (there are loads of other choices).

An interesting alternative if you just want to test your java skills is to go and test out the Google App engine which provides you with the servers to run your application on and combining this with Eclipse to make it fairly easy to write and publish your application.

However if your aim is to develop web pages forget about java, C++ etc, except if you want an application to sit behind your pages.
 
What's your eventual goal?

I would learn web design, don't get overly hung up over CSS, then learn PHP for data access.

If you want to work at a big company then ASP.net might be worth looking at, but for entrepreneurial web development / home contracting, then PHP is simpler, cheaper and faster to get going with.

Rgds
 
I'd argue that ASP.Net was simpler, cheaper and faster to get going with.

It's free, you can drag/drop controls onto the page using a WYSIWYG designer and wire it up to a SQL Express database all without writing a single line of code.
 
slylittlefox said:
But what will he have learnt about coding? :confused:
Click to expand...

The idea is that you first learn about the framework and how everything is wired up - then you can dive into the coding and see how it all works under the hood, rather than have to write it all yourself, from scratch.

From the question it's clear that the OP knows very little about webdev (ie. ASP and Ajax aren't languages, they are frameworks and programming concepts), so it would be good to start from first principles and work from there.

/me shrugs.
 
Thanks for the responses guys. I think I will head down the ASP.net route, and then, time permitting look at PHP just to give me a wider array of knowledge. My end goal would be working for a company doing web development.

Mr^B you're right, I'm not clued up on webdev at all so I am a complete noob. I might also look into Ruby if it is a 'modern approach'.

Again many thanks for the help. It's good to know that I have been steered in the right direction :)
 
I have worked on in several large ASP.Net WebForms projects. I really wouldn't go down this road. If you want to do something in .Net, look at ASP.Net MVC - much cleaner.

Something like Ruby on Rails would be a good choice too.
 
I'd agree with topbanana on ASP.NET vs. ASP.NET MVC. Standard ASP.NET attempts to emulate the Windows Forms approach in a web scenario, which is a strange thing to do, and altogether misleading for beginners.
 
fez said:
Continue...
Click to expand...
...Because ASP is completely different to ASP.NET?

cyruscatfisher said:
I'd love to learn ASP so I could **** off how crap it is compared to PHP. On a serious note - C
Click to expand...
I haven't used it, but people trash (e.g.) PHP all the time for being a badly-designed language that got popular.

And your serious note is using C for dynamic websites? -_-
 
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