I think it's worth learning as soon as possible. You might not decide to program with it for every day tasks but you'll learn how to manage memory and how to create/use data structures that you will be using in other languages all the time.

Almost everything you learn is applicable to any language. cs50 also ends with some php and an introduction to web development. There's also the cs75 follow up course for more php/mysql knowledge with the same professor.

I think cs50 is a huge win because the quality of the course is so high. The professor and the TAs are a million times better than any free course lecturers I've ever seen, the homework assignments were interesting and there's just a silly amount of videos.

I agree completely that C is not a good choice as a starting language as this comes from someone with a lot of C language programming experience. To me anyway, its clear that "object oriented" development is an essential part in learning to develop software and C just doesn't cut it for that.

Thanks this was exactly what I am looking for.

Apologies to everyone else for cluttering up your thread.

omg finally got around to making my way through the Python tutorial....wow, this language is the straight up nuts

Which tutorial are you referring to? I've got the tutorial video from PyCon '13 which will probably suffice but would be interested in other resources.

http://docs.python.org/2/tutorial/

Nothing too fancy, lol.

I'm really not a fan of C as a first language these days. I'd even prefer *shocker* Java.

Python, Ruby is the way to go though. If JS had a decent intro book I'd probably even recommend JS these days.

Why JS?

for all its warts, js is at heart a simple, dynamic language where functions are first class, and there are simple patterns to do OO programming. i think it makes a lot of sense as a learning language, especially if you're interested in web development.

Thanks! Will have to take a look at it when I have time to do something other than .Net

Real javascript *is* a decent language, no matter how hard certain browsers tried to ruin it.

So does that mean the general consensus is JavaScript > PHP.

Good to know if so, as I was getting ready to delve into PHP so I have at least some familiarity with Web Development other than HTML.

js is a much nicer language than php. also, if you lean javascript you could just start using node for your backend (also js) and avoid php altogether.

The only thing worse than PHP is programming your webpage in byte code, and even that's debatable.

What other good alternatives to PHP are there?

I have a PHP job interview next week.

.

Well, the question was really: what languages other than javascript, but ok...

Ohh, my bad, misunderstood your post. You meant: what alternatives to JS are there other than PHP? I guess Ruby on Rails...

Rails, Django, microsoft world

I sort of dislike these kinds of questions...but:

I'm planning on installing Linux on a spare laptop of mine in order to familiarize myself with it, as I've never really used Linux before and will be entering the IT job market this winter. Pretty much want to get familiar with it so I can put it on my resume (understand file system, basic shell commands, etc).

After looking around the past few days, I'm leaning towards Fedora. I want something a little more nonbeginner-ish than Ubuntu/Mint, and maybe it's just me, but the little I've read about Red Hat it seems sort of contradictory to the whole Linux/Open Source philosophy(?), so that leaves me with Fedora, Debian, and Gentoo. Not sure why I'm saying Fedora out of these three...I guess the Portage system in Gentoo seems weird to me but may also be interesting to play around with. For my purposes, does it even really matter?

Thoughts/opinions/suggestions?

Since 0.5 was on HN recently...somehow I totally missed that LightTable supports Python since 0.4. Just installed it and did a quick Hello World to confirm and made it my default editor for Python. Will probably play around with it a bit and report back on the weekend.

You should certainly consider Arch, I keep hearing good things about it (and the package management) and it's fairly up to date. Gentoo is neat but got old pretty quickly for me. It's fun to play around with and I did learn a bit about chroot and general recovery strategies by destroying my install multiple times :P

Dunno what you mean with the nonbeginner-ish but I do like Ubuntu alas I use Xubuntu (even LTS) on all my machines. Ubuntu has a big community and it's usually easy to find answers to questions that may arise. I used to run Debian but I always switched between testing and unstable, could never really settle on the bleedyness of the edges I wanted and destroyed stuff a lot. Apart from the Debian=more free harhar the difference between a non-Unity Ubuntu and Debian are actually fairly small imo.
Fedora is fine, basically the RPM counterpart to Ubuntu imo (could also go with Mageia)

I dunno from your description Arch sounds right for you

If you are after a challange and fun project and nothing else...Linux from Scratch FTW (then try it with dietlibc or something crazy )

Warning very open ended and noobish question (I know very little about infrastructure building) ahead!

Say I wanted to develop a simple "web framework" for some language (using existing networking code). What's the base functionality I should provide? I was thinking
- Capability to handle HTTP and the general "server stuff" (already exists not too worried about that)
- Some way to connect to a database (ODBC) and transform data into something that feels natural in said language i.e. ORM for OOP languages
- Render said data in a browser in some way (e.g. create views for data)
- REST interaction with the data

Thanks clowntable. I think I may give that Linux from Scratch a try, looks awesome.

clown:

- basic session management