So where does one begin in developing their programming skills.

A quick look at the list of programming languages on the Wikipedia is a daunting exercise for a beginner and unless you have some sense of what you want to do with this skill you are looking to develop and this journey you want to embark on, you are lost in the multitude.

So I did a little research and found some articles that I thought I would share:

7 Programming languages on the rise

10 Programming languages that could shake up IT

Teach yourself programming in ten years

The first two articles list all sorts of programming languages to consider – From languages I’ve never even heard of like Dart, Ceylon, Go, F#, Opa, Fantom, Zimbu, X10, haXe, Chapel; to more  familiar and established languages like Python, Ruby, MATLAB, JavaScript, R, Erlang, Cobol, CUDA.

I also had to consider a lot of the job postings I’ve seen internally at the company I work for required skills in SAS, VBA, and SQL.

The last article linked above was more of a emphatic plea to take the time and learn a language and the underlying principals of computer programming. That quick solutions books like Teach Yourself Java in 7 Days or the endless variations on that theme weren’t the right approach.

Although I agreed with the article’s author for a person such as myself starting out on this voyage a little later on in life, one cannot dismiss resources in such a fashion.

There are a indeed a lot of options to consider.