What applications and programming languages would you recommend as being the most useful to learn programming?

For example, the project to work on would be creating something like one of those football manager games. Here would be an extremely simple example of something that i would work on and make more complex:

Randomly generate "Players" and give them names.
Allocate attributes to players with numeric values, eg skill
Create an interface for the manager to browse available players and choose them.
Add up the total skill of the chosen team.
Compare it to the total skill of another team.
Use the skill difference to randomly generate a chance of a goal occuring every 5 minutes.
Print the result of the game as it occurs.
Print the final score.

That sort of thing.

What do you reckon?

Please help

I suggest you to begin with Java which can be used under Windows, Linux and other systems.

If you just want to start writing code, you might want to try Python. If you want to become a serious programmer, I would say start with C.

If you want to learn Java, google for a program called "Eclipse", that should get you started, it might even be in the repository I'm not sure :S

Regards

I got eclipse going - it is very nice. I was even able to follow the "hello world" tutorial and got it to run properly! This is great

Now, where are some more nice tutorials for learning java, that help me get used to working in eclipse and programming in java?

You can try Suns' tutorials

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/

But to be honest, the best place is google http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en...e+Search&meta=

Also try looking for some cheap books on eBay, look for some Java Discussion forums/IRC channels


Hope this helps

Regards

I also would recommend Python for an overall starting point, or C if you've got more serious interest.

EDIT: Python, like Java, is not platform-dependent, but it's not a compiled language like Java so your programs are even faster and easier to test and debug.

Not totally true -- Python uses just in time compilation, i.e. code gets compiled when you try to run it. The python program creates a .pyc file which is the compiled code. If you don't change the original .py source, python will just yse the .pyc and not have to recompile the program, making subsequent executions faster. I believe .NET does something similar, but am not totally sure...