Hi all, well I have F37 up and running, now I want to start learning a language for programming and wanted to know which is a good language to learn for getting back into IT field? I’m old, but still have some brains left to learn something new…LOL
Thanks,
Jose
To some extent, different languages come to be preferred by different fields, so choice of language should be informed by your area(s) of interest. There are many projects looking for help with testing and documentation where advanced programming skills are not needed to get started and make useful contributions. Github is widely used by such projects as it was designed to support projects with many contributers, but there are also small groups doing open-source projects looking for testers, correctons and translations to documentation, etc.
Thanks George, but I basically wanted to know what a good language to start out with? As for fields, well let’s just say that I used to support MS Exchange Servers, and other messaging applications. I started to learn PowerShell, and that’s when I was supporting larger enviroments. Now I want to learn a language that can help me learn fundamentals of coding. So figure I’d try Python and will worry about JScripts or Java after I get a better understanding of structure.
Thanks,
Jose
I agree with the sentiment that there many options, but… I would choose Python.
This has replaced Java as the intro language of choice in many colleges — and the great thing is that it’s useful practically as well. For example, it’s the main language used in Fedora Infrastructure and web services. It’s also popular in statistics and in scientific computing.
It’s easy to get started, and there are many tutorials and resources.
Programming concepts and skills are transferable; after you learn one language, it’s much easier to learn another. Python being easy to learn and widely used makes it a great first language. Even if you end up using other languages primarily, you can still find many uses for Python (e.g. automating smaller tasks).
I recommend Python for Everybody for first-time programmers. You can do the course through one of the listed providers (free/paid), or by following the materials and YouTube lectures on your own.
Related:
I agree with Python being an awesome first language as it’s tailored to be easy to use (mostly). In certain fields such as data science, Python is very popular (including where I work!)
I would also like to suggest CS50 from Harvard University CS50x 2023 for an introductory tour of programming (contains a bit of web development, database querying, and Python while cementing your foundation for anything you learn in the future).
Slightly harder languages but still good: R for data analytics, Java, Haskell/Scala (with a completely different flavour of programming, I found them eye-opening despite all the other languages I had learnt).
I recommend Phyton or Rust, because both languages help you to get fast and reliable results and you will learn how to structure a given problem and then to translate it into your preferred language. Both languages are High-Level-Programming languages in contrast to C. Both languages are muli-platform suitable.
I hope it helps you to find the right way to your “new world”.
I’m also recently (coming up on 5 years) retired from a job were I helped people avoid generating nonsense with complex scientific systems, so a bit of programming and a bit of numerical analysis. One of the big systems started using Python just before Python3 came out. At that time, “Learn Python[2] the Hard Way” was recommended. I assume there is a Python3 version by now.