I think I’m leaning toward C# and .net as a concentration language for learning web development. I would like to learn good programming fundamentals and I’ve looked at pretty much everything else. The four I’ve narrowed it down to have been C#, Python, Ruby and PHP. Is there a reason to stay away from C# (and I don’t think the cost issue would really apply to my solo-developer situation but I could be totally wrong). Any thoughts?
I realize that these are all great languages so I’m not trying to ask which is the best overall. However, would Ruby be a viable alternative for a first language or does it have too much ‘magic under the hood’ coupled with Rails, and unorthodox methodologies? I do like what I’ve seen with the language.
If you go with C# for web development, depending on your experience with web technology, I’d heartily recommend starting with ASP.NET MVC before ASP.NET Web Forms.
ASP.NET Web Forms is the original style of building ASP.NET applications, and tries to abstract a lot of the details. It allows you to build applications without realising what’s happening under the hood (post data, state management). In my opinion, these abstractions although making things easy at first begin to ‘leak’ when you get into more complicated scenarios (as this tutorial proves).
ASP.NET MVC on the other hand makes it easier to build web sites that are a lot ‘closer to the metal’ while still keeping you productive. If you want absolute control over the resulting HTML and aren’t afraid of things like cookies, form tags, post and query string data, then you might enjoy ASP.NET MVC a lot more.
Of course it would be beneficial to know both. But if I was starting now, I’d probably start with MVC and move to Forms (then realise how bad it is and move back :)).