Please help...deadline approaching!!!

[carolinagurrl]

I'm writing a paper for school about web programming languages. It would help me a lot if you guys (and gals) with some programming experience could answer a few questions. What is your experience in web programming? Which language do you prefer? Why? What are the differences between them? Would you use a different one for personal or business? Which one is easiest to learn? Which one is most widely used today? Which one should a beginner learn first? Thanks to anyone willing to help me out!

[perkster]

in terms of server side scripting languages i prefer ASP as i learned to program in visual basic and like microsoft access and SQL server, but i know PHP and mysql too, PHP is cheaper to run as you can run it without windows server, but ASP needs to run on a windows machine. ASP is easier for newcomers, PHP better for people coming from C or C++ background but both easy really.

[Petef56]

Personally, I steer clear of Microsoft programming languages after being negatively impacted
too many times. Microsoft keeps changing things and it forces you to learn new ways to do
the same old things and constanty upgrade software. At least for Web development, I
switched to PERL. PERL is very stable and it's FREE. There are plenty of books to help you
learn it as well as many websites and forums to get more info and support.

For beginners in PERL, I recommend the Sams book.. Teach Yourrself PERL in 24 hours.
After that, locate some free PERL programs on the internet that already work and use
them as a base for creating your own programs. With PERL, the only real cost is an
investment in books, but since newer versions of the language always builds upon itself,
the books never go obsolete as they do with Microsoft programmming languages.

Long Live PERL!

---pete---

[Force Flow]

I learned C first, which is the backbone of many common programming languages. I then learned Java, followed by SQL, C#, ASP.NET, JavaScript, and ActionScript. Somewhere along the way, I picked up a little Windows batch scripting too. I've also picked up HTML and CSS over the years as well.

Which do I prefer? Java, for the most part. It's easy to understand and work with. C# is good too, but it's best not to learn on it because it has a lot of proprietary programming quirks that don't translate over into other languages. If you try to jump over from Java JSP/Servlets to C# ASP.NET, there's a bit of learning curve since serving pages is handled quite a bit differently.

I'd say Java is the easiest to learn, in terms of a true programming language. Unfortunately, it's not used nearly as much as other languages for some reason (due to the fact that it *does* require training and that it's primarily seen as a learning language).

PHP is what most people learn because it's open source (free) and easy to pick up. This one is also based off of C. However, its popularity often produces poor, fly-by-night programmers. But, this one still probably remains the most popular one by far.

VisualBasic and C++ I don't much think much of. The sytax is pretty sloppy, and it's easy to put bad techniques into practice. Java is usually picky about what you do, so it prevents you from doing stuff that VB or C++ would accept (but not neccessarily run...or run well). But, C++ is still the most common solution for writing Windows applications straight out of the box. C# Windows applications require .NET 1.1 or 2.0 to be installed first.

As for SQL...the only major complaint I have about it are DB2 and MySQL. They're quirky/nuanced. There are a lot of limitations to those databases when it comes to doing anything remotely advanced. PostgreSQL on the other hand, is closet to supporting the full SQL standard. Why that one isn't the most popular database to work with, I have no idea. Both MySQL and Postgres are open source (and, of course, free), but somehow, MySQL is undeniably the most popular database to use.

So, for web programming, there's two schools of thought...going the cheap, scripting route where you can teach yourself (namely, PHP), but won't likely ever go on to advanced programming (ie, object orientation and whatnot), and the trained route, where you learn more capable languages, such as C, Java, ASP.NET, C++, or Ruby on Rails (although this one is kind of in the middle and hasn't gained much popularity yet due to limitations in writing advanced features). You're more likely to get a job with the trained languages since companies know it requires some basic training to acquire the concepts of programming. C#/ASP.NET seems to be a good one to get into right now since a lot of companies seem to be switching over from older languages (ASP, Perl, and VB--VB for the reasons I mentioned earlier).

You most definately need to learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (though, not as much as the other two). Flash/ActionScript is certainly a plus, but not a requirement. It's best to learn JavaScript first, then move to ActionScript, since many of the same principles apply in that direction.

While there are a lot of languages to pick from, and you most likely will end up brushing against most of them in your travels if you are serious about web development.