Ask HN Best language(s) and/or framework(s) for self-teaching?
tl;dr - materials engineer revisiting coding as a tool to develop web apps. What languages/frameworks are best for self-teaching?
---
More detail: 1. My father was a Cobol developer 2. I was writing TRS BASIC code in elementary school 3. Used to build X86 Wintel machines when that was a popular thing 4. Breezed through AP Computer programming and my one undergraduate computer class (intro to Java) a decade ago 5. Never had a class that talked object and/or database structures and the like 6. No real coding since undergrad except for little bits of Matlab here and there for "science" things 7. Never had a Linux machine (purely Windows), but thinking of switching my Thinkpad to Ubuntu or Mint 8. In the past year I taught myself enough CSS, PHP, bash, and Apache configuration to run a Wordpress installation on shared hosting for our wedding website. 9. Now that the wedding is over, I'm taking baby steps on a friend's Linode VPS and trying to digest nginx in the context of making Wordpress run quickly and securely.
I have a healthy respect for the huge gap between writing executable code, and writing good code. I don't know that I've ever done the latter. So much has changed in decade, I need some help on where to start.
Thanks all,
-p