Re: What programming language should I learn first?

Not a lot of people mention it, but learning SQL data storage is actually a really good starting place. It has nearly universal application later, and it also teaches you about data types. You can parlay the knowledge right into making PHP scripts to read the data and print it on screen, and then HTML and CSS to make it pretty. (Doesn’t have to be PHP. You can swap PHP for any other language of your choice that can fetch data from SQL. Python does this perfectly well, for example.)

So to reiterate, the reason I suggest SQL first is because you’ll use it almost anywhere regardless of what language you choose. Everyone needs data storage. It is extremely practical because when you’re learning programming you’re always wondering in the back of your mind how you’re going to make your data permanent. The answer is almost always SQL.

Consider installing MySQL Community Edition and MySQL Workbench and then taking a MySQL course on YouTube. Get comfortable reading and writing to the database and joining tables. Then try to figure out how to read and write to the database using a programming language of your choice. That’s when you start making real stuff.

This also sets you up to realize every programming language is mostly the same because it’s all about reading and writing data (making data persist). What language you choose to read and write that data is actually not a very important question most of the time or is decided for you depending on what you are making. So consider starting with something fundamental like SQL.

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