What Should I Learn After PHP? [closed]

Answer 1

First know that you do not have any limitations than your own exitus ;)

If you have fun writing programs, browse the internet and look for applications which you think of 'man I could improve this' or 'nice tool, but I have some other ideas'.

Then just look after the languages in which these applications are written and do some quick research about the difficulty of creating such an application by yourself (e.g. on stackoverflow.com).

When you have found some project which you really want to set up and you have chosen the language which makes the most sense for writing this application: Start learning this language.

It is not always important to look for a specific language, just look for a project and set it up.

Answer 2

Develop something that can bring limelight to the programming language. A library or class file which can help the community.

You can also think of something where you can make things much simpler compared to current process which if you feel is hard slog.

Answer 3

A hint to "the next step in programming" in my opinion could be found by looking at some CS program curricula in some major schools. If I were you, I'd pick something completely different from web programming, just to expand my view.

If you are 15, I'd suggest learning C# and try to write a simple game like Tetris.

Answer 4

Your train of thought is correct: it is important for a programmer to learn different languages. I would suggest Ruby, and Ruby on Rails.

Rails' great advantage is it makes it easy to do things the right way -- being able to pass your code to another developer without him spending weeks just to understand your code is pretty big deal.

The current tendency in a lot of languages is to put them 'on Rails', i.e. implement the MVC environment. This was done for Javascript, .NET and many others.

Answer 5

This is very subjective, but here goes.

• It wouldn't hurt to know a very corporate language, like Java, for web development.
• Learning a framework for it, like Spring MVC, would be very handy. Spring also has concepts like AOP and IOC, worth knowing.
• Adding in Hibernate for DAO/ORM would be useful.
• Ruby on Rails (Ruby is the language, Rails is the framework) is another web development track.
• Sometime during a programming career, you'll need to know one scripting language; Python or Perl.
• Learn tools like Maven or Ant, Subversion or CVS, and make sure you know how to use an IDE, like Eclipse.
• If you don't know Linux, that can be fun to play with and useful professionally. Try Ubuntu.
• From a theory level, learn about Data Structures and Design Patterns.

Data Structures is usually the second university course in computer science, and will almost certainly help your coding. If you build examples to teach yourself this, use a language you don't know yet, so that you gain both knowledge of a new language and knowledge of new theory simultaneously.

There are online references for learning the material. You should be learning about linked lists, trees, and graphs; sorting, searching, and O(n) analysis.

From a hiring manager's point of view, I wouldn't interview anyone without demonstrated knowledge of data structures.

In any case, Project Euler might also help you; it's a group of programming tasks designed to help you learn new languages and have tasks to help you solve new problems.

Answer 6

I think you should try for a big change, to expand your horizons. Learn Python, get pygame and program a game, for example tetris, but could be anything. I would definitely recommend doing something non-web-based though, because it'll help you see things from another angle.