Choosing a programming language course
Choosing a programming language course depends on what you plan to do. It can be overwhelming, because there are literally hundreds of programming languages. Some of them are popular, some are not, but making a choice can be very difficult. After choosing a programming language, there is also a need to choose a type of the course, but this seems to be relatively easier task.
What you see is what you should get
Before you choose a course and a language, it is necessary to define what do you want to achieve? If you plan to develop web pages choices will be different than if you choose to code applications. Bad choice will make your efforts useless, so once again, choose carefully. Amount of time necessary for a programming language course is significant, and it is not worth of loosing it.
Web site creation tools – JavaScript, Flash, PHP, HTML, SQL
If you plan to develop web pages, then perhaps your programming language course should concentrate on one of these languages. Why? JavaScript is very useful to extend interactivity on the web pages, flash (which is a language used for animation) will give some extra life to your pages. PHP is commonly used as a tool to create dynamic web pages, in conjunction web database language SQL. And HTML, which describes how to render a web page will keep it together. Unfortunately, web development requires some knowledge about all those languages, so it is almost impossible to concentrate on only one of them.
Application programming – C, C++, Java, Delphi
If you plan to concentrate on application development, your situation is more comfortable. You can choose one programming language course and concentrate on only one programming language. But which one should you choose? Common choices are C and C++ (which is simply object-oriented version of C), because of wide array of professional-quality compilers and speed of compiled code. Another possible choice is Delphi – an object-oriented version of Pascal, very elegant and generally easy to use language. But if you plan to create applications which are platform-independent, then you should consider Java – although not as fast as C or Pascal, it has a serious advantage. Java uses Java Virtual Machine to execute so-called bytecode. Bytecode is the same for each type of machine, JVM is responsible for translating it into machine code, so a pre-compiled program can be used on any computer which has a JVM installed.
