Ask HN Best language(s) and/or framework(s) for self-teaching?

2 points by phasetransition 15y ago ↗ HN

Hello from a lurker turned first poster,

tl;dr - materials engineer revisiting coding as a tool to develop web apps. What languages/frameworks are best for self-teaching?

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More detail: 1. My father was a Cobol developer 2. I was writing TRS BASIC code in elementary school 3. Used to build X86 Wintel machines when that was a popular thing 4. Breezed through AP Computer programming and my one undergraduate computer class (intro to Java) a decade ago 5. Never had a class that talked object and/or database structures and the like 6. No real coding since undergrad except for little bits of Matlab here and there for "science" things 7. Never had a Linux machine (purely Windows), but thinking of switching my Thinkpad to Ubuntu or Mint 8. In the past year I taught myself enough CSS, PHP, bash, and Apache configuration to run a Wordpress installation on shared hosting for our wedding website. 9. Now that the wedding is over, I'm taking baby steps on a friend's Linode VPS and trying to digest nginx in the context of making Wordpress run quickly and securely.

I have a healthy respect for the huge gap between writing executable code, and writing good code. I don't know that I've ever done the latter. So much has changed in decade, I need some help on where to start.

Thanks all,

-p

1 comment

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cfdrake 15y ago ↗

Personally, I think Python is a great place to start. It's an easy, simple, clear language, and it lets you get stuff done quickly. Plus, it's relatively quick for being a dynamic language and has a lot of high quality (and free) books/guides for new users[1][2][3].

In terms of frameworks, I think if I was just starting, I'd try out something small like Flask[1] or Bottle[2], and get the basic concepts of how web apps should be designed and deployed. Afterwards, I'd "graduate" and take a look at Django via the Django Book[6].

[1] http://diveintopython.org/

[2] http://greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkpython.html

[3] http://learnpythonthehardway.org/index

[4] http://flask.pocoo.org/

[5] http://bottlepy.org/docs/dev/

[6] http://www.djangobook.com/