Forum Moderators: phranque
At this point, I feel pretty comfortable with my knowledge of XHTML and CSS, so I thought it was time to move on to learning some scripting languages for the web. I'm not a stranger to the idea of programming; I have a bit of background in C++ and Java, but haven't used them extensively.
Which ones are worth it? What little I know has been gained from surfing the web in general.
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Javascript? I understand it when I read it, more or less, but I don't want to rely too much on client-side languages, if only because server-side scripting ensures the user can see your page (flipside: assuming the server can handle the processing load). Then again, it's widespread.
PHP? First impression is that it seems cumbersome. Would I be better off using other languages and development frameworks such as Python (django) and Ruby (on rails)?
(My)SQL...seems like it's "the" database language, and it also seems like it's been widely-used, so even if there's a shift away from it for some reason, it would benefit me to learn it in order to understand existing systems if I get a job working on them. Or is there a compelling reason not to?
Perl? Seems like it has a good rep. Also looks a bit more complex.
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In general, I'm looking at the following order:
Javascript
PHP
MySQL
Apache (not a language per se, but I'd like to know my way around it)
Python/django
Ruby/on Rails
So...opinions? Thoughts on the pros and cons of each language? Do I have any blatantly wrong preconceptions?
Overall it seems like it would be worth learning the major languages just to understand existing code, but which ones will serve me best as I try to get a good footing as a web developer?
This is a question that regularly comes up. You may gain some insight by reading previous threads on the topic of which languages to learn [google.com].
