Dear lj

[jossish]

If your work were going to pay for you to go and learn a programming language so you had some kind of technical knowledge that would help you with managing IT projects and potentially with moving up the career ladder within IT, what would you learn? Bearing in mind you only have some feeble HTML and CSS knowledge and have struggled to pick up

Comments

[libellum]

Perl. Definitely not PHP :)

[grendelyn]

Alas, I wouldn't learn to program beyond a bit of SQL or whatever -- I don't. Learn to use Eclipse and software management tools, things like that. Also-- make work pay.

[grendelyn]

(Sorry, I misread, didn't see work was paying for it. What are the choices?)

[jossish]

I think pretty much anything - I had a conversation with the director this morning and he essentially said that in terms of working here, if I want to stay in IS, I need some experience as an analyst, some as a project manager, and some as a technical person to give me credibility as a manager. Whether I agree with that or not, I would like to try and learn a programming language because I've struggled with trying to learn in the past and I'd like to know if that's because I just can't do it, or if it's because I've had bad teachers.

He suggested Visual Basic but that seems to tie me very much to Windows. I know Java is hard, so not that. I need to find out what else our developers use & therefore what might be useful for me in terms of working here (as well as being a transferable language for other workplaces), but I thought I'd ask the internet too, cos the internet is smart!

[grendelyn]

I had to do that stuff too -- I did all web development for about a year before I got into hardware.

You can't go wrong with VB or Java, but neither is really terribly exciting, IMHO. (VB is pretty important though.) Is there a hardware/CISCO/infrastructure kind of track?

[andrew_j_w]

I would without question say Python. However, it really depends on what sort of work your company does and what their main language is. If your company actually does Visual Basic work then, as your manager suggests, that's what you should learn.

[scaryjeff]

I second this. Python is the way to go.

[jossish]

I read a very long thread on Lifehacker that also suggested Python was the way to go! I'm going to talk to my line manager and see if that would actually be any use for us.

[aoanla]

It's a bit late, but I third this.