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I started with Basic in the 1980s, played with Fortran, Cobol, Assembly, VB6, VC++ 5 & 6, Borland C, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and liked Perl and C++ the most so 99% of everything I write is in those two. Then tried out the Visual Studio Express 2008 and 2010 and liked those a lot which also introduced me to C#.
Of everything I tried out the languages Most favorite to Least favorite are:
C++, Perl, C#, PHP, Python, Basic, VB, Ruby, Fortran, Cobol, and Assembly.
So my top 3 languages are C++, Perl, and C# for what I need to program up.
Reasons why I like these top 3:
C++ - is powerful, fast at just about any task you throw at it. The cons for a new programmer are that this language is more complex than others to grasp and without someone to guide you when you get compile errors you can go crazy trying to find the problem if you dont know how to use the debugger or you forget to add a required include etc. So you need to know dependencies etc as well as there are many various ways that C++ is written depending on the programmers structure preference. I can only relate this difference in structure to that of writing in Print and Script. It says the same message written in the same language, but looks far different from each other in how its written.
Perl - I use mainly for very quick down and dirty console ( DOS shell ) programming. So vs writing a C++ program that would be way more keystrokes, if I have a program that I am writing up quickly to read in and write information back to files for example, I will use Perl which is strong at this and requires far less typing. Basically the same program that Perl can achieve in say 6 lines of code, C++ could take 20 lines of code to achieve. The drawback to Perl though is that its not compiled, its executed from its source file. So if you have a program that you want to share with others and run independently without the Perl interpreter installed on each machine it runs on, you will want to write it in C++ instead. Perl is also more geared towards Server Side Execution and creating Dynamic HTML for web servers etc, even though I use it mostly for quick down and dirty programming.
C# - 2008 and 2010 with Visual Studio Express I like because of that its perfect for rapid development of creating Windows Applications in a WYSIWYG and it automatically populates sections of code so you dont have to type the whole program source from scratch etc. C# replaced C++ for writing Windows Applications with GUI interface. *Many people have asked me why I didnt just go with Visual Basic for Windows Application development, and all I can say is that I just never liked VB much. I started off with VB6 and there is just something about it that I didnt like so I went the route of C++ and then C# for Windows Application development with GUI interfaced programs.
Lastly, as far as books go to learn by example, which is the best for people who like to learn hands on. I would suggest getting one of the Microsoft books that comes with the DVD on the back page with Visual Studio Express 2010 or newer and source files for all projects contained in the book. I Bought these books as a guide to changes between 2008 and 2010 as well as to learn C# from by example, and it was the best $25 book I ever bought for a programming language since I learn best by example either typing the code up out of the book and compiling and troubleshooting or loading up other peoples source code and observing how they did what they did, and whenever in question, altering a section of the code with a comment tag of XXXX to find it quickly in the source etc when dealing with large programs etc.
When learning Basic a long time ago on a TRS-80 Model 1 with 16k RAM, I typed in programs out of magazines from the TRS-80 Magazines, and many times either I made a typo or the magazine was printed with a typo and so it was hours of programming and troubleshooting to eventually have sprites go crazy on the monochrome display etc, and usually taking programs to use and program by example and bending them to be something different using the concepts that were shared to make programs of your own such as turning a Calculator program into a Point of Sale Program etc, or a Stock Market simulation game etc introducing random generators, and then learning to seed the random number generators with a time seed etc so that the same random numbers dont occur upon future execution to where what is random is not really random, but the pattern the algorithm follows in which a die roll from 1 to 6 if run without a seeded timer could be 4,3,1,6 and each time the game is run without the seeded timer its always 4,3,1,6 until you add the seeded timer and then the time delay in keystroke from the user alters the output to be more random so you will get 4,1,2,6 the first time the program runs and then say 5,2,3,1 the second time it runs etc in which 4 die are rolled or a single die is rolled 4 times and the output no longer follows a predictable pattern with the seeded timer to the random generator etc.
