

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

Hello from a lurker turned first poster,<p>tl;dr - materials engineer revisiting coding as a tool to develop web apps. What languages/frameworks are best for self-teaching?<p>---<p>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.<p>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.<p>Thanks all,<p>-p
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cfdrake
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/>

