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General Discussion

How to divide up time learning different languages

So I have been programming seriously for about 3 months now. I did program before but on and off and have been making steady progress using PHP.

However as well as learning PHP I want to start learning Javascript and Python.

I'm interested to know how people divide up their time to learn multiple languages.

2 Answers

Hi Mayur, I'm a University graduate in Computer Science and so have been programming for about 4-5 years now and IMO the best way is to just focus on one language at a time. I started off learning Python for a year and then switched to Java for about 6 months. To which I went and learned C for 6 months after that. What I found after this was that any language after enough coding/programming experience can be picked up in a matter of hours/days. Once you know the fundamentals of how programs work and how languages manipulate data it's a matter of adjusting to the syntax of different languages. However this is just my opinion and I am by no mean the most experienced programmer, I'm sure there will be plenty of other opinions :) Happy programming Mayur!! -CodyTheCoder

Hi Cody,

Thank you for the reply.

So my best bet is to stick to learning php for now.

Sometimes though when making websites I need to know a bit of javascript, do you think it would be ok to learn little bit of javascript just to get me by on the side, or I should stick to php solely for now?

Hmm I see your dilemma being that website design involves a few languages. I would suggest deciding how comfortable you are programming in PHP, if you are reasonably comfortable then making a switch to learning a bit of javascript should be no problem at all because the syntax and the languages in general are very similar. And given you are not writing very comlex javascript code you should be absolutely fine learning a little bit of javascript! :)

brilliant thanks a lot Cody

I can't upvote your answer for some reason, but I would if I could : )