Hi!
Im going out to the book store tonight, and i wanna pick up a book on a programming language PHP, JAVA, other things like that.
But I cant decide what I want to learn?What do you think is a good and easy language to learn?

Chris

Well, PHP was pretty easy for me to learn, but I had many years of programming prior to that. Anyways, you have to look at what you want to do and what your needs are. If you decide to go with PHP, then take a look at http://www.php.net/manual/en/ - There is everything you need to know about PHP.

Good luck.

Perl. :D Great for sys admin jobs and web programming. :)

How about DHTML? lol And for server side, Perl and CGI definitely.

I'd say go with PHP, it's easy to learn...

PHP definately...

and also try to look into XML :)

The best langauge to learn, is C, as it will give you an understanding and basis for almost any other language (any decent one anyway!). If you know C, learning Perl, PHP, Python, Java, etc., is all going to be easier, not to mention C++. Perl and PHP both are close to C in a lot of ways too. PHP is closer than Perl in a lot of ways. If you know Perl, you know PHP already, for the most part, since PHP can be written to resemble Perl or C, or both. Mainly, it's just getting used to the different syntax between them, as many things are very close.

I'd suggest you learn C or Perl, and PHP is surely a good bet, since PHP will make you be able to read some Perl and C code and know what it's doing. It's hard to say, some people don't like the syntax of some languages. Perl is a much more mature and advanced language over PHP and is more powerful, but PHP has it's advanatages too. PHP now has a command line environment, as I understand, but I've never used it, because I absolutely see no point, when we have C and Perl and shell already. PHP might, though, be more what you're looking for in a web environment. For Perl to be as efficient as PHP (which is _can_ be!), you'd have to use a tool like FastCGI, mod_perl, etc., or write your own Apache module (if you're using Apache) in C or Perl, which is fun, but takes a lot of knowledge.

Try out a few of them (Perl or PHP, for example, as C takes a little more effort to have it working on a web environment) and see what one's you like best. Just remember, that when you're learning one of these, although the syntax of another will be different, you're learning much of the same things. However, don't start with Java, because there's things that Java doesn't have that you should get used to using, that it can't offer that these other langauges can. That is my suggestion.

For PHP, try to get some books by Wrox (big, red books) on PHP 4. I think O'Reilly might have a PHP book too, but you can get all the information you need from the PHP web site and by looking at other PHP code and figuring it out, and just by doing it. As for Perl, if you decide on that, you can get about any O'Reilly book (Learning Perl, Programming Perl, The Perl Cookbook -- in that order) and you should learn about everything you need -- and there's a lot more Perl books that are good, but there's just so many and those are the most important one's. Also, Perl has extensive documentation and manuals too.

If you decide on C, you can get free C compilers on a Unix variant, or on Windows you can get a few free one's too (I don't recall the name right now though). If you learn C, there's a lot of stuff online to be found, but the books I'd suggest, would be "The C Programming Language, by Kerninghan & Ritchie (the guy's that wrote the language, published by Printice Hall). Also, Practical C Programming, published by O'Reilly. There's more, but those are very good for starting. Well, I could go on and on and post all my opinions and my suggestions, but that should cover the main 3 in use right now, being C, Perl and PHP.

AHHH!
LOL Im Getting all these different responses!:D
Is C easy to learn?
I Think i might either pick up PHP Or C

Any other comments?

Do you guys recommend any good books on these languages?I Think Im going to go pick it up at Chapters (I Dont know if the states has those)

Well, one of the best programming books I've ever read is Programming Perl by O'reilly. I read it a few years ago when I first was learing Perl, but after 6 years of programming Perl, I now do most of my work in PHP. The reason I changed to PHP is because it is made for the web and makes a lot of things easier. It has a lot of functions and is pretty fast.

PS. I still love Perl :love:

:D

Umm
If there is any good scripters for PHP or Perl Could U please post ur ICQ# here, SO u can be my mentor!:D So I can ask u the stupid questions.

I'd suggest Perl.

You can do your CGI scripting in it, and write lots of handy scripts for doing admin tasks on your server or desktop.

C is good to learn, but it takes longer to learn than something like Perl or PHP. It's also not as practical in the sense that it takes longer to write programs in. Certainly for casual programmers, I don't think C is the best. I'd agree with everything Tim said on the topic thoguh.

As for books, I have a really nice one called "Perl Core Language - Little Black Book" (Steve Holzner, Coriolis 1999). It's really good for anyone with programming experience. Of course, I'd be recommending the "Perl Core Language - Black Book" for those with zero experience :D. The little black book is obviously a shorter, more reference type book than the black book.

PHP is easy to learn especially if you know C.

Its also fast, robust and becoming very popular.

A lot of things can be done using PHP. Incidentally, PHP can be used to 'generate' html,asp, javascript and various other code. Nowadays Im seeing PHP being used even on NT/Windows based sites (Eg: innerhost.com)

A combination of server side and client side languages
such as PHP + Javascript can do wonders.

You can get lotsa help at various PHP forum sites like

phpbuilder.com, phpheaven.net etc.


Cheers

Matra

Go with perl. If you do you will have an easier time coding in PHP and C later on.

BTW, My ICQ is in my sig. :D

perl , php and ...

C get the one from Sams publishing.

Go with PHP. I regret (not really :D) starting with Perl instead of PHP. Perl is a pain in the :stickout and PHP is fun to learn a script ;)

$statement =~ /^.*?(?:what|do|you|mean)(Perl)'s*?a\s+?pain\?.*?$/ig;
print qq|I'd still go $1|;

perl = headache!:angry: :angry:

Originally posted by Lawrence
$statement =~ /^.*?(?:what|do|you|mean)(Perl)'s*?a\s+?pain\?.*?$/ig;
print qq|I'd still go $1|;
Exactly,lets see you PHP people with your little regexese match our Perl Pattern Matching!
Perl ownz all!
And it was REALLY easy to learn.
Go with Perl,you WONT regret it.

I started with perl - when I got into PHP I raved it to all but then I found that there were a lot of drawbacks and decided to concentrate on perl.

Perl is very very usefull for sysadmin, PHP is great for dynamic webpages and db connectivity!

I have also found that javascript makes form checking a dodle - it may be useful to look into javascript as well.

PHP - PERL - JAVASCRIPT

Get all three if you have the budget.

For perl get programming perl (o'rielly)
PHP get Professional PHP programming (Wrox)
JAVASCRIPT - no recomendation, I learnt what I needed from the web - webmonkey etc.

Perl is also good for the web,and is also good at databases using the DBI module.

This is vaery true and I personally prefer perl.

I have used both and my experience is that perl gets the job done every time for me - if I cant work out how to do somthing I check on cpan and see if it has already been done, it usually has.

5 minutes later the project is done:D

Perl rules!

OK,
So PHP is for web pages and database conversion?

What Can I do with perl?

Originally posted by creid
OK,

What Can I do with perl?

Everything!!

I searched the web and found an article that explains the difference between Perl and PHP. I hope this gives you a better idea..

http://apachetoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2000-07-07-001-01-NW-LF-SW