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If you don't know how to program

4 points by noelchurchill ↗ HN
and you have a relatively simple web app you want to make, where do you start. What scripting language would be best to learn on? All the RoR buzz started to lead me in that direction and I bought the agile web dev book, but now I'm not sure if that is the best place to start. Now I'm more thinking about PHP. It's simple and very forgiving. From an unexperienced programmer, it seems much easier to just hack something together.

Any other input? Thanks!

6 comments

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gscott
When I first learned a scripting language I learned from examples, go here for lots of free examples: http://www.codango.com/. Besides scripting learn sql and how to normalize tables.
nextmoveone
The most important part is to just start, as soon as possible somewhere. Cause you'll pick up on common practices as you go along, plus you need as much experience as possible to produce a good app.
run4yourlives
I'd learn Python honestly. It's very concise and can take you from nothing to something without needing to change languages.

RoR might be a little difficult for a newbie, and PHP is going to give you a lot of bad habits that you'll eventually need to break.

davidlee
What do you want to gain from it?

If you want to learn a lot of good practices and maintain and extend your codebase in the future, RoR is fantastic - but may be a steep learning curve due to all the new concepts and levels of abstraction involved, and is somewhat harder to deploy, and probably somewhat more expensive to host.

If you want to "hack something together quickly" to deploy cheaply on any of a wide range of hosting providers, PHP provides a famously productive way to make a mess^H^H^H^H simple web app.

german
Lets start from the beginning: It's a Webapp right?... so, I asume you already know HTML and CSS, or maybe Flash...

If you don't, start learning it.