Begining programming

[rsimmons]

I need some advice. I'm looking to get into programming. But I am unclear where to start. I have worked with VB 5.0 a little and it's starting to make sense. I don't know if I'm doing more bad than good studying an outdated language. Is .Net the thing to get into now a days? If so there are so many .Net languages, which one should I look into. The Director of IT where I work says that I can't go wrong with VB, but asp.Net is for creating web based apps. And this is where everything is headed. He said learning some SQL would be good too since almost every app needs to pull from a database. I'm looking for some input from you all. Please help me out.

Thanks,
rsimmons

[Dillinger4]

I would say try and take an objective approach. I say this because asking this type of question on a site that's geared towards the language you are looking to learn will naturally yield a biased result. M$ languages are perhaps a bit more popular and while at first this does look good because of the larger number of employment opportunities you also have to factor in the larger amount of people programming in MS languages (more people == more competition).

[StrangerInBeijing]

From your point of view, you should not see any language as outdated. You can use vb5 and learn a lot of programming stuff, like control-of-flow, database access, etc..you know...get the feel of the whole thing.

Dilenger is right with what he said. My suggestion is you decide where you will be the next 10 years, and spend a few days looking at job ads, statistics, etc and figure out what is more popular in your part of the world. In my case, back in SA it would be M$, but up here in China it would be opensource and I could land me a kick#$se job if I know Java, php, etc well. just do some research, and in mean time enjoy the vb5

ps: You could also use the time looking for a new avatar...geez, some ppl scares me!

[penagate]

A programming language is a programming language.

If you need to learn .NET, I would go for C#; for non .NET, I can't offer any real objective opinion but I can say that VB5 is fine.

Learning the concepts of .NET is most important if you want to be programming for the next Windows (Dunno what it's called anymore, Longhornm, "Vista"??) as that is all built on .NET. I use VB6, but when/if I start developing for WinFX I will probably use C#, to avoid the inevitable confusion that will arise if I mix VB6 and VB.NET (separate languages, but similiar enough in syntax).

It's always good to know several languages; that forces you to learn pure programming concepts, rather than language-specific techniques, which you can pick up as you become more proficient at each language.