Web and software programming languages
 

Hello all and accept my congrats for the ideas you have been giving each other.

Im very new to programming and I don't know where to start.
I'm ineterested in learning:-
1. C#.NET or VB.NET. Can you please advice which one is quicker and easier to learn.

2. ASP.NET or PHP. Can you also please advice which one is quicker and easier to learn.

Im more interested in web design/development and web applications to start with.
I'm :confused:

I hope you will all pop in. Thanks in advance.

Kinuthia

Since you're more interested in doing web design/development and web applications then you should properly do that because if you are really interested the subject you will hopefully do well in it.

VB.NET is easier to learn, but I would go with C# for most windows based projects. Why not learn it now, instead of later when you realize VB.NET will not quite perform how you want it to?

I suggest PHP for web development. Picking up a bit of database knowledge will do you well also... mysql.com.

I, too, would recommend C# over VB.NET. In my opinion, the language is syntactically cleaner (a result of the need for VB.NET to cater to earlier incarnations of VB, and BASIC in general). C# is also the flagship language of the .NET platform, and as such, there are some features that are easier to take advantage from C# code than from other languages. That said, it's still worthwhile to get a working knowledge of VB.NET, if only to understand code snippets that might not be in your language of choice.

Also, I would start with Windows forms development, rather than ASP.NET or PHP. Web development requires not only general programming skills, but also things specific to web development. For example, since HTTP is a 'stateless' protocol, some things work in a counter-intuitive manner. When learning programming for the first time, it would be helpful to not have these additional gotchas thrown into the mix.