[prog] Re: Welcome to the "Programming" mailing list

[Jacinta Richardson]

G'day Diane,

Welcome, it's lovely to meet you.  I'm in Victoria as well and have done quite a
few years running my own consultancy business.

> I really enjoy programming, but I know nothing about C or perl or any
> other useful language (I used to work in something called Foxpro) so I'm
> hoping to start picking up those skills here.

A good place to start is the courses archives.  See what we've covered already
over at http://www.linuxchix.org/content/courses/

The "best" programming language for the job depends on what the job is.  Having
said that, a lot of the currently popular (general purpose) programming
languages are "good enough" for almost all jobs.  I find that most people find
that one or another "makes sense" more than others and thus tend to stick with
that.  Some other people just stick with the first language they learn.

While I think that C is a very useful language, I would personally suggest
starting with something a little higher-level, like Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby...
These save you from having to learn about really low level things like memory
management while you're also trying to learn syntax and programming basics.

If you're interested in Perl, I provide free course manuals on my company
website:  http://perltraining.com.au/notes.html  Let me know if you think you
spot any errors (including spelling mistakes) as these are the course notes I
provide training from  so I'd like them to be as correct as possible.

> Are there any web-developers/programmers here?

Yup, I've used PHP a lot, but didn't really like it.  These days I use
HTML::Mason (a Perl environment) because it allows me to componentize websites.
There are lots of web developers here.

All the best,

	Jacinta

PS:  You may want to change your mailman password now that you've sent it to a
publically archived list.

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