| I disagree with starting with Java. Rather I second coffeemug's advice in the following comment, focus on C, Lisp, and Haskell: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1747713 My first manager taught me something college had failed to (or that I failed to learn there), which is that programming languages come and go in trends, but they are all based on recurring fundamental concepts, which endure beyond any single language. Most new programming languages are a remix or mashup of some or all of these concepts, so if you master those concepts you'll be able to easily pick up any other language. It's like learning Latin as your first foreign language, and being able to quickly pick up any Latin-based language after that. C, Lisp, and Haskell are the Latin of the CS world. Since you're at MIT, take the famous Structure & Interpretation of Computer Programs (used to be 6.001, not sure if it still is). http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma.... That'll get you started with Lisp (specifically the Scheme dialect). For C, start with K&R (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language_(boo...). For Haskell, Real World Haskell is good, and the e-version is free. (http://book.realworldhaskell.org/) Joel Spolsky has an article worth reading on why not Java: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchool... And of course PG's essays on Lisp are a must read: http://www.paulgraham.com/lisp.html Since it sounds like you're running a business you may feel pressured to learn Java or whatever your coders are currently using to get your business off the ground. But I heartily recommend resisting that pressure, doing it right, and mastering the enduring fundamentals first. It may cost you something in immediacy and expedience, but that's what school is for, especially one such as MIT. You should carefully weigh how you spend your time there, and unless you think you've got the next Facebook, focus on mastering the enduring concepts, not the trends. You'll be glad you did the rest of your life and career. PS - there's little to nothing that Clojure (a Lisp dialect on the JVM) and Haskell can't do in the web space, so the cost in immediacy and expedience is slim to none anyway. PPS - it didn't register till just now that you're an Econ Major not going into CS or Software Engineering as a career. If you just want a tried-and-true, versatile, easy-to-get-started-with language with tons of libraries and frameworks (reusable code) to hack in, huge and helpful community go with Python. Java is too bureaucratic a language for this purpose. Start with Zed Shaw's excellent introduction, Learn Python the Hard Way (hard way = by doing lots of follow-along examples until it gets into your brain muscle memory), then go from there. http://learnpythonthehardway.org/index |