Newbie Programmer needing direction.

I'm pretty sure PHP has a majority here on this site. I have done ASP only a little bit and nothing in Ruby. PHP has been the best choice for me for reasons you mentioned. I haven't had anything yet that PHP couldn't handle.

Thanks pr0gr4mm3r. I think I'm leaning to Rails, but I just can't shake the openness and support of PHP. I have heard that Rails has saved a lot of programmers a lot of time... but I guess they weren't trying to do something they had never done before either (enter PHP's huge internet community).

Thanks everyone for all the help you have been.

I wouldn't recommend it as a first programming language (especially one you're learning while not subject to pressing business constraints). I've found that it is conducive to poor design habits and novices either eventually have to unlearn them with some effort, or indefinitely repeat them.

General perception of demand might not be the most reliable way to choose a language to learn programming with. That said, Ruby is the language, Rails is a framework, and Ruby could be a reasonable choice. There are other frameworks available too.

ASP.NET is supported in Mono, and ASP.NET MVC was recently released under the Ms-PL licence without additional use restrictions. It does run under Mono, but may not be production-ready yet. There is a mix of free and non-free components in the ASP.NET ecosystem, so you might still like it.

(In this case, C# would be the language.)

PHP meets those particular requirements, perhaps better than any other language. But I recommend approaching this with a different set of constraints. Look for a language or environment that reflects good, thoughtful, robust design, architecture and engineering practices -- rather than one that appears simple at first. It may mean paying a slightly higher initial cost in terms of learning difficulty, but that will pay itself off in the long term.

Consider Python, Ruby, Java or C#, then. Or if popularity isn't a big deal to you, a Lisp (e.g. Clojure), Scala or Haskell might be worth your time.

Good luck.

The following link is a LONG read but in your position I would take the time to read it...
http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/01/php_vs_ruby_on_rails_an_evol...

I'm one of those people that jumped into PHP without really learning the right way to work with it, just the easy and fast way. I never actually read through a tutorial or manual, just looked through different scripts and examples to learn, and I've come to understand that my programming skills in PHP are quite sloppy and bloated.

Now I have run quickly through C++ and am right now reading a manual on Java, and I am finding Java, which you pretty much have to use appropriately, is a great language to learn to advance to something like PHP. I've never dealt with Ruby, so I can't compare the two, but I will say that upon learning something like Java, picking up PHP will be mainly about the syntax moreso than the idea and structure of programming.

Thank you all. Special thanks to Abhishek Reddy for making me look at things in a different light. Python, Ruby, Java or C# will be my new "to compare" list... Do these all accomplish the same end results, or do each of these languages have different strengths and/or applications?

I'm sorry for my complete ignorance on the issue. I'm trying to read up on it all as I really need make a decision soon - a decision that will no doubt effect my future in web design/development.

Thanks again everyone!

OK then. Thank Abhishek Reddy (again!). I reckon I'll be going for Ruby then. I hear it can be harder because there are more than one way to do anything, but I guess I'll get used to it. I actual took about thirty minutes on the ruby site this morning and went through methods, arrays, strings etc. and I think it is (so far) pretty understandable. It's like reading English - not programmerish.

Thanks again!

PHP is good but its only good for making small portals and shop carts. Grow up! Get into ASP.NET learning it is fun and challenging it lets you to write a codebehind file which is not scripts its a normal C# program that works in conjunction with the page's asp tagged elements.