What do you think is the best web development language to learn
these days? Ruby? Php?

Neither of those on their own are enough, nor do I think one is better than the other, plus you left out many other options. To be a decent developer you also need a good handle on many other technologies, since a single programming language on its own is next to useless.

Start with XHTML/CSS and even HTML5. Once you have a handle on those, you can learn some javascript and perhaps get familiar with some javascript libraries such as jQuery and Prototype. Then perhaps you can begin thinking about a programming language such as PHP, frameworks etc. You will still need to learn other things such as Flash, Photoshop and so on.....

There are many languages present on the internet which are used for the website development like JSP, .net, pHP ruby and many other languages. People choose these languages according to their need. I think to make a website PHP is the best language.

I found php best for me...as it is much easier than others.

And most of people prefer PHP as you have put it in PHP section. lol

I think PHP is great to get your mind around main tasks, but ASP for more professional development

HTML & CSS are THE only languages websites can be built in.

Gmail is written in Java.
Wikipedia is written in PHP.
Many parts of google.com are written in Python.
Slashdot is written in Perl.
Twitter is written in Ruby.
Stackoverflow is written in C#.
The list goes on...
As you can see, there is no best language, a language is only what you make of it.

For the presentation layer you need HTML and CSS. For client-side functionality you need Javascript. For server side functionality, it depends on the task and the tools available to you. For example, I once wrote a site registration/payments system in C as php on https was way too slow to execute at the time. Now, I'd probably use php as it has improved so much from its early days. PHP is easy to learn (easy to not learn as well, which is why there's so much naff php around) and there's a huge amount of functionality/scripts freely available.

PaulW is right, just must differentiate between front-end and back-end.

At the end everything will be parsed to HTML/CSS... that's how it is!

The best has to be in you not the programming language .

In market many language is available but i satisfied in HTML & DHTML.

i say PHP because it's ultra fast to develop using it.

Go for ASP.NET with C# and then switch on to PHP.

To be good web developer you need to learn all commands and programing languages. First of all start some basic HTML and then CSS. And after that Javascript. w3schools.com is great source of programing language.

Originally Posted by stickykitty6w

What do you think is the best web development language to learn
these days? Ruby? Php?

Very simple answer to this;


The one you can learn well enough to write code in!

The best web development language is HTML. The hardware is fast enough that the performance efficiency of the language is largely meaningless until you reach the point where you're getting thousands of hits per second. Its coding is very easy and interesting to do.

I would say PHP without any hesitation.

My vote would go towards php because its code runs faster, its programs runs in Windows, Solaris, Unix and Linux.Its mostly tools are available open source so it is cheaper to use and it is much flexible in terms of database connectivity.

I have used Perl, Java(Servlets and JSP) and PHP for web development in the past. PHP is my language of choice for performance and ease of development. This is easy to learn.

I've realised it's 100% definitely Java.

If today Java (NOT javascript/livescript, for anyone still using the misnomer) were used much more broadly and above all instead of flash/swf/flv for video broadcasting, we would be living in WILD times believe me.

Java built online video systems would really be 100% self-contained "rich media" - not just animation or video with sound, or a few clever little swf programming possibilities... oh no. Do video through java and I think you'd end up with the most amazing editing and production environment you could dream of, as the entry level free open source standard.

Right now swf and flvs are the main area for video, learning php and perl to manage things like MING to make video is one key discipline which will either become more and more important or lead to a revised platform for this area which itself will become phenomenally important.

But I think I'm going to think about digging up my java experiments and having a look at solutions people have online for using java to play flvs etc. No doubt they are out there and readily available. The only flaw in java is the fact that you may not be able to know if certain viewers are locked out of it because they simply have old machines whose browsers do not have adequate java installed. Or at least that's what it was like last time I tried, years ago, but maybe by now things are a little different. I would hope so.

My initial investigation has led me to discover this possible route into the java jungle for seeing if I can make a little video studio in java for myself
http://fobs.sourceforge.net/

Another key advantage in that is that if you play an flv via java, you are likely to find it much easier to make it impossible for people to download/rip/pirate your video.