HI, I am a Nursing student and am off on summer break. I am a wannabe computer geek as well and I want to spend the summer learning a programming language, but I can't decide which one i should focus on. I am considering either C++ or Visual Basic. If any one can give me their opinion I would appreciate it. I want to do this more for personal satisfaction and to become more intimately knowledgable of the inner workings of computers than to become a professional programmer. Thanks!

Edit: Moved topic from General Chat to the more appropriate forum. ~ Animal

I personally would suggest Java. It is a development from C and C++ though it is a separate language. Java is very portable - that is, your programs would run under a number of different operating systems. Java is also a very good language for network and internet programming.

You can get the full Java Development Kit (JDK) for free and there are many very good support forums where you can get help. It is a well supported language and has gained a great following among professional programmers.

Visual Basic would link you very much to Microoft environments and is really a dinosaur in the modern world of Object Oreinted Programming.

Alan

Ok thanks. I'll check it out. I want to at learn the basics of something usable in the next three months or so and one of my main priorities is that it is something that I can learn for free over the internet.

This question as been asked many times on here, do a search for learn programming or something.

Well I've been using the original Visual Basic for 14 years. I bought VC++ before hand because I was told it was a good programming language but I couldn't make head nor tail of it. VB is simple and still available on eBay.

Now a days people are using VB.Net which only has a similar resemblance to the original. You can download it free from Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 but I haven't found a way of burning the ISO file to CD's.

I can't offer and deep insight or anything but i would agree w/ one of the above posts that Java would be a good place to start. It's what i've been using for the last two semesters. From what i understand, we use it because they (comp sci teachers) want us to focus on object oriented programing and Java is good for that. And free is always good : )

I would agree with the Java path myself, I have just about finished my Computer Science Msc Java was fairly easy to learn. As Java is similar in style to C you will be able to learn C a lot quicker after Java.

With respect, why would anyone want to learn C after learning Java. Of this group of languages C is the earliest and most basic - still usefull but only for certain types of programming, mainly for small process controllers.

C++ (C with Classes) is the Object Oriented development from C. This gives full philosophy and use of Objects and is the development into a more meaningful programming paradigm.

Java is the next step - all the beauty of C++ and Objects without the difficulties of handling pointers and dynamic memory allocation and deallocation that so often leads to memory leaks. Java looks after all this for you and because of this is in many ways easier to learn then C++.

Java is now the language of choice for both straight applications, browser applets and network programming. Java programs are portable and will run under all flavours if Unix, Linux, Mac OS and Windows without the need to recompile.

If you are starting to learn from scratch, why not start with the latest developed and supported language? All resources are free - compiler, online tuition and reference manuals, forums and chat rooms. You can get top class professional help from the teams at Sun Microsystems. This means that it is probably the best language to learn if you are not in a class-room situation where you may be limited by academic choices.

Whatever language you learn, it will take many, many months of hard work to become proficient and years to become professional. Learning for a few weeks over a summer break (presumable far from full-time and with other distractions) will only allow you to gain a rudimentary understanding of any modern language - maybe it will motivate you to go further - I hope so.

I have been programming and teaching since 1962 and I hope my opinions may be of use to you - but they are only my opinions

Alan

If you want to start learning why not start from the usual starting point-C? After C, you can move on to C++. In my opinion, starting to program in Java before being familiar with C++ will not be easy.C++ provides a basis for object oriented programming.Once you have learnt C,C++ VB will be very easy.

If you have to start from scrath learning OOP it doesn't really matter whether you start with C++ or Java.

If you are aiming at ultimately learning Java because of its advantages, why not just start with instead of taking the extra step of learning C++

Java has the advantage of being simpler to learn than C++ since the user doesn't have to learn how to use pointers effectively and will avoid the problems that pointers can lead to. The same can be said about Java doing all the memory allocation and deallocation instead of using "new" and "delete". No more memory leaks!!

Alan