I am currently in the final 2 quarters of my web programming degree and I have found that I am getting horrible crunched for time and need some advice. Currently I am working on Java, Visual Basic, and Perl. I am finding a lot of places saying that Perl is no longer very relevant and others saying it is. My issue is I want to prioritize my study time appropriately so I turn to those who know it most. Should I be placing heavier focus on Visual Basic and Java? I also have PHP coming next quarter. In order of importance what should my focus be?
Depends on what parts of the country you want to work in. In my part of the country, there are more C# jobs than anything else, though PHP is gaining in popularity. In other parts of the country, Ruby is more prevalent. In others, it’s Java.
As long as you get good fundamentals, especially in application design and OOP, the language itself really doesn’t matter.
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So there isn’t really a specific standard? It is really a matter of preference from one developer to the next essentially? Obviously different languages excel in different ways to a degree though.
The standard changes. In this part of the country, there were few web jobs available, and what was there was classic asp or Flash, with JSP making in-roads. Now, it’s .net and PHP, and almost no JSP or Flash to be seen…
Other portions of the country are different, though. California seems to lean more towards the Open Source languages (PHP, RoR, etc), though I’m sure .net is popular there as well…
Yes, different languages have different strengths. So there are different factors on what language is being used - purpose, language familiarity within the organization, etc.
Thanks a ton for the input. I will try to back off on learning the intricacies a little bit and try to focus on the general OOP design model. There is always time to learn more/refine what I learned outside of school. We all know that isn’t even optional anyway. School seems to barely touch the tip of the iceberg with programming capability. There is always more to learn it seems. Whether it be more languages or going deeper into the ones you know. Thanks again!
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