First of all let me explain myself so that you can understand my situation well. My name is Eva and i’m 19. I’m dong job in local company as data entry opreator. It is my passion to become a good and professional software Developer. I don’t have any degree related to computer sceince or any other field. Now my plan is to take admission in BS in CS or IT online virtual university but i know that with just degree it is much hard to get job, experience is much necessary. So i have decided to do job and study at same time. So now i want to join any company as software developer in few months.

I have find so many jobs on newspapers and also on internet who doesn’t require any special degree their requirements are similar to these.

• Must have a solid background in Microsoft Technologies (.NET Framework 2.0, 3.5 etc, ASP.NET, C#, VB.NET, ADO.NET, SQL Server) and databases
  

• Microsoft Visualbasic
  

  C#
  

  Microsoft .NET
  

  Microsoft SQL Server
  

  ASP, CGI
  

  ETC...
  

So now I’m confused that how to get command and full knowledge about these languages I have searched on internet like youtube but I’m confused that where to start learn, which language I should learn first and then second language I mean step by step. So here are some points on that i want to get advice.

1. How and where i should start learning these languages. Which language i should learn first and then next?? I don’t wanna pay any dollar to buy any language course so is it possible to learn through internet i mean youtube videos and other pdf books.
   

2. Which is most demanded and valuable language that will help me in my career?? ( well I’m hearing about .NET)
   

   Is it necassary to know about background of language i mean all terminologies of relative language for making a complete application or it doesn’t matter we can make complete software without getting all infomation about language.
   

I shall be very thankful to you if you can give some advice.Thank you so much in advance.

Regards,
Eva

Please, don't post in more than one forum. Please, use the default font size: I have configured my browser to get text of the size that I like, and yours is too big.

You need to pick one language (C# is fine if you want to learn .NET) find a tutorial to get you started and then program for a while. Find little projects for yourself and complete them. You'll need to learn a lot of things along the way (about the language, algorithms, library functions...). Once you have done this for a few months, I would try to read a book about the language so you know what else you might have missed.

If you want to be any good at programming, you need to collaborate with other people. Most of the time programming is a group endeavor and learning how to work with others (including reading other people's code and writing code so it's easy for others to read) is extremely important.

Also, don't think you are going to get anywhere in a few months. Read this.

First of all let me explain myself so that you can understand my situation well. My name is Eva and i’m 19. I’m dong job in local company as data entry opreator. It is my passion to become a good and professional software Developer. I don’t have any degree related to computer sceince or any other field. Now my plan is to take admission in BS in CS or IT online virtual university but i know that with just degree it is much hard to get job, experience is much necessary. So i have decided to do job and study at same time. So now i want to join any company as software developer in few months.

I have find so many jobs on newspapers and also on internet who doesn’t require any special degree their requirements are similar to these.

• Must have a solid background in Microsoft Technologies (.NET Framework 2.0, 3.5 etc, ASP.NET, C#, VB.NET, ADO.NET, SQL Server) and databases
  
• Microsoft Visualbasic
  
• C#
  
• Microsoft .NET
  
• Microsoft SQL Server
  
• ASP, CGI
  
• ETC...
  

So now I’m confused that how to get command and full knowledge about these languages I have searched on internet like youtube but I’m confused that where to start learn, which language I should learn first and then second language I mean step by step. So here are some points on that i want to get advice.

1. How and where i should start learning these languages. Which language i should learn first and then next?? I don’t wanna pay any dollar to buy any language course so is it possible to learn through internet i mean youtube videos and other pdf books.
   
2. Which is most demanded and valuable language that will help me in my career?? ( well I’m hearing about .NET)
   
3. Is it necassary to know about background of language i mean all terminologies of relative language for making a complete application or it doesn’t matter we can make complete software without getting all infomation about language.
   

I shall be very thankful to you if you can give some advice.Thank you so much in advance.

Regards,
Eva


If you're completely new to programming, I would recommend "Learning Python the Hard Way", by Zed Shaw: http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/. It's freely available online and it's extremely practical. This is not going to teach you Microsoft's stack, but for a beginner this is fine. Python is arguably one of the better languages to learn first and will give you the foundation to pick up other languages later on.

To address the MS-specific technologies, here is my (slightly biased, since I'm a developer using mostly Python/Linux in my day job) recommendation: Don't lock yourself into the Microsoft stack. I suggest that you stick with technologies that either are platform-agnostic or even tend to favor technologies centered around Linux/Unix.

As for which languages are the most in demand. it's hard to say, and I wouldn't worry about learning _the_ language which is in the highest demand. Instead, focus on learning _one_ of the in-demand languages. Python is one of them, so that's another reason to start with LPTHW.

Once you have a grasp of basic programming, you can start branching off into other things like databases. Zed Shaw, again, has a nice intro to SQL (all of his books are here http://learncodethehardway.org/).

Hope that helps.

Thanks for giving some advice but i'm thinking to learn C language first of all than other all like SQL, ASP.NET AND VB.NET ETC

why are you going to learn c for? c++ is much more modern, why dont you take the advice these users have given you instead of staying arrogant?

i myself would recommend Java first( to understand the basics of OOP's in a n easy fashion), then c++, then c#, then whatever else the fk you want to learn.

I think it's going to be very hard to "get into" programming on your own using just the internet. Unless you're passionate and have a grand plan then you'll need other people to motivate you and make progress with. I suggest joining a club or taking some kind of class where you interact with peers and an instructor. This will light a fire in your that will burn for your entire life always motivating you to more forward. If you think you can learn something like software dev. from watching youtube videos for an hour after work each day you're mistaken. You've got to have a solid foundation first with which to stand on. For me that was going through college where everyday I worked with a hundred other students and teachers to learn about computer science. I don't think you can replicate that by watching videos and reading articles by yourself.

I, personally, started with BASIC, then C, for the most part. People make too much of a push for object-oriented programming when it comes to beginners, especially since most people don't know how to teach these concepts. I, myself, was a bit of a victim of that nonsense; I was initially taught C++, and I wasn't taught right. The only buzzwords people were using were "objects" and "inheritance", and when I was finished with the course, I had a library with everything being an object, even things that shouldn't be objects. I had objects that had no data, or a need to share the same namespace, just a group of helper functions that were hardly related and poorly constructed. People were so busy trying to push OOP principles that they failed the most important lesson: _why_ it is such a great feature, and how to use it.

It wasn't until after of years of C that I realized how an object-oriented language would make my life so much easier, and that it is such a great construct. I still use C, but I gained an appreciation for OOP when I had to go through the pain of implementing various object types that would have been better done in an object-oriented language.

It's like giving someone a fork, before they have ever tried eating anything. They might hold the fork awkwardly, and manage to eat some things well. They'd eat fries with it, pizza with it, hamburgers with it, ice cream with it, cereal with it, soup with it, water with it... If they don't understand why they have the fork, just that they are supposed to use it, they'll use it on anything and everything, even though sometimes it is better to use their hands, or another tool, instead.

For this reason, I cast my vote for C. If one cannot recognize the need for an object-oriented language, and how best to use it, they'll learn bad habits. If one teacher can successfully teach OOP and have a student use it in a way that years of experience would teach, then I'd commend them, because I see years after years of students making anything and everything an object with public members of everything, no setters or getters, having them circularly dependent, with _everything_ as a singleton, and all other abominations because they don't know _why_ they should use these tools that they have. It's just been drilled into them that this is the way to do it.

Well actually i'm totally new in programming and but i love IT and Computer field i'm working just as data entry operator in local company that is okay for now , until i got a good job. So i want to choose a computer field to get started there are so many fields like computer administrator, Software developer , Web developer ETC. As i have no experience of any of these categories so i searched on internet and i found that Programming is best for me cause it has a future, well i'm fast learner mostly i learn computer skills so fast as i think. So i want to choose on of these two categoris .
Software developer or web developer
As till now i have no experince of above these categories. To my information of few days i got that web developing is little bit easy and demanding languages than software developing but software developing has more wages than web developing. So now i'm confused which one i should i choose????????????????