No Experience in Programming, Learn objective C or go with C first? or another language?

Question

Basically a graduate in Business and due to circumstances I live in an area where I do not know anyone, and have some free time (work full time in unrelated industry). Instead of getting baked I would like to learn something new where I can actually have something to show for it.

I do not have unlimited free time because of work, so roughly an hour to two hours on weekdays and 4-5 hours week ends. I would like to build something in the near future. So would it beneficial to learn C or should I just jump into Objective C. Or would you recommend another language?

Please say if you are self taught or not?

Answer 1

If you're completely new to programming you're better off picking up an easier language than C. Python or Ruby (+ on Rails) would be a good first choice and there are loads of good tutorials online, places like Codeacademy and Rails for Zombies.



As a business graduate, depending on what you might be doing, I have found a scripting language like Python to be very useful in your day to day for quickly automating some of your daily tasks.



And as you asked, I'm not self-taught, CS major here with 12+ years professional experience.

Answer 2

If you're looking for something to use in the business world, then your choices should really be VB.Net or C#. Those are your two most common business programming langauges.



If you're looking to write games ( and honestly, don't most computer programmers start with that as a goal? ) you want to look at C# ( it's what Microsoft XNA studio supports ) or C++.



Not self taught, or at least not entirely... I got taught FORTRAN, PASCAL ( my first language ) and COBOL in school, none of which I ever used once in the real world.

Answer 3

If you want to truly understand how Object Orientated programming works you should start out with Java. Simply because everything in Java is very well documented and it's a very common/popular language, so you will have a lot of information/tutorials on the internet at your disposal.

Answer 4

If you learn any c based language well you should be able to easily transfer that knowledge to any other c based langue. c is considered one of the hardest languages for beginners so I wouldn't go with that. objective c is not as bad but not the easiest either. Some languages lend themselves to beginners, Python is a really popular one and what this book uses:



http://www.headfirstlabs.com/books/hfprog/



Not self taught, CS degree

Answer 5

I started off by learning Java, making it easier to learn C++, but C is pretty much one of the original programming languages. You can learn any programming language, as they all share important core similarities. The only thing you'd need to worry about is the APIs you will use to program.