Happy New Year to you all ;)

Im new to programming and looking to make it my new years mission to learn a programming language.

The two I looked at was Python & Java.

I think i have settled on Java as this is more powerful (So Im Told) as it
can run on more systems.

Are there any good books I should be looking at or that someone would
recommend for a total beginner.

My only programming I have done was on a BBC Micro at school about 20 years
ago on Basic doing simple For Next loops and print.

Any help would be great,

Phoenix.

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Happy New Year to you all ;)

Happy New Year to you too :)

Im new to programming and looking to make it my new years mission to learn a programming language.

The two I looked at was Python & Java.

I think either of those would be good as a first programming language, but why only those two? I think C# is also a fairly good language. Also, although C++ is an older language, C++ is still used fairly commonly, and updates to the C++ standard are even happening more frequently now than in the past. C++ also has some features that other languages don't (such as multiple inheritance and more direct memory management), so it can be worthwhile to look at C++ to get an understanding of some of those concepts.

I think i have settled on Java as this is more powerful (So Im Told) as it can run on more systems.

I suppose technically, Java does run on more systems (I've heard of it being supported even in some embedded systems), but I'm not sure that matters a whole lot for a beginner. There are Python interpreters for Windows, Linux, UNIX, and Mac OS X, so if you're just starting to get into programming, you would certainly be able to use Python easily if you wanted to.

I've heard that Java is faster than Python, but as far as being more powerful, I'm not sure about that (and that also depends on what is meant by "powerful"). Python has a fairly large selection of modules and libraries to choose from; however, Python 3 broke some backwards compatibility, and I've heard there aren't as many Python 3 libraries to choose from as for Python 2.

One advantage I can think of for Java (although not directly related to the Java language) is that if you feel like you might want to develop Android apps, Java would probably be the way to go, since Java is the main language used for Android app development. Other mobile devices use different programming languages though - For instance, for iOS you would use Objective-C and/or Swift (which is Apple's new language that they released in 2014).

Nightfox

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