3 ms·

PHP

• paulgb 19y ago
  Since you said "web applications", and not just web in general, I will assume you know some HTML. Although I am not a huge fan of PHP, I think it is probably the best language to begin with for a few reasons: - Tonnes of resources for learning - the language is not difficult to start with, and there are plenty of tutorials and books aimed at beginners. - For a web language, it is pretty much as powerful as you need it to be. - It is probably the most common web-based programming language. - You can find a server to host your site for very cheap, and download the software to set up your own development server for free. - PHP is taken seriously as a language, and powers some of the largest sites on the internet (Digg, Facebook, Wikipedia) The downsides are that it does not encourage good coding practices and it is easy to write an insecure script, but this is true in any language or framework until you know what you are doing.