Prior to my diploma programme 5 years back, I had never touched programming before. The first programming language I learned was Java. As with most new thing, the initial start-up was difficult, confusing and slow. However in a short time i grew to love programming and the more I dive into it, the easier and more fun it became.

Understanding is the key. The hardest part of programming is to understand the concept of programming. Once one can grasp the concept, everything else will seem to fall nicely into place. But if one is unable to understand the concept, programming will always remain something mind boggling and cryptic.

Programming is full of jargons. Contrary to popular belief these jargons were not created to make programmers feel elite (we are elite :p). All Jargons are tied to concepts, allowing programmers to communicate with each other in a highly efficient way. Take for example when i say “expression”, programmers will understand that I mean “A line of code that produces a value”. (i.e. 10 > 5 is an expression that produces a value of ‘true‘)

The not so good news is that this jargon-concept learning curve is steep. The good news is that once mastered it’s applicable to all (more or less :p) programming languages.

Ok I lied. The title is just marketing :p Anyway if you’re interested in learning web technologies, one of the best places to start is w3schools.com. Start with HTML leading on to XHTML followed by CSS before jumping into programming. From my experience PHP is one of the easiest programming languages to pick up as a beginner.