hi there!

this might look like a "unanswerable" question but... here it goes:

i'm working in a financial institution for about 7 years, now. i'm a programmer and i use mostly Cobol and some RPG (AS/400 platform, today known as iSeries or i5). i also have some SQL knowledge.
what i would like to know is: having concepts of this languages, how hard is it to jump to the "net languages"? i'm pretty sure there are loads of differences, like, for instance, Java is a object oriented language. this is rather confusing for me because it "destroys" the "well behaved" top-down style that i've got so used to

my intention is, firstly, to gain some experience here, developing a site and then improve my wife's site (which is pretty awful, by the way).

and if, some (very distant) day, i turn myself into a guru, i hope i can live from developing sites and leave the bank (pretty boring) and get myself time to SURF!

thanks in advance!

This post has been edited by dau1970: May 19 2007, 11:59 PM

I've developed software for 11 years (this Decemeber), and it is my personal belief that once you learn to program, it doesn't really matter what language you are using. Think about it. Your thoughts about how to make it work are the same, the language is just how you make your thoughts work. You still have the problem solving skills to work through problems that you come across in programming, and hopefully creativity. Those will not change, regardless of what language you use.

I have an excellent set of tutorials that I am developing for learning the language PHP, a language used for creating dynamic webpages. While they are only about half way done, they still cover the basics of PHP, and you can create something with it if you can piece together the basic concepts(another skill that you probably have).

Good luck to you, and happy coding!

alright, ghostrider!
perhaps one day i'll prepare a tutorial on something else, too
for now i'm just trying to gather as much information i can and organizing my ideas on how the whole thing works. thanks again!

This post has been edited by dau1970: May 20 2007, 12:40 AM

As Ghostrider says, the logic is all the same, so you are a step ahead of most people.
And if your Cobol experience includes Databases, (which it probably does), it places you leaps ahead of a new "web language" user.

My background includes some Cobol, Basic and Fortran. Php is easily learned if you have any Programming at all. The biggest thing you will need to learn would be the distinction between what can be done Server side and what can be done Client side. But Ajax is closing that gap, too.

Good luck in your endeavours. Looking forward to seeing the progress you will make.

By the way, search the Tutorials and review a couple of them which discuss setting up the XAMPP or WAMP Installations. Each of them provide a PHP parser, a MySql Server, and enough software (ie: phpadmin) to allow you to build and test all of your Applications. With an XAMPP set up on your machine, all you need is a decent Text Editor, and there are lots of them available. Personally, I use ConText.

thanks, jlhaslip.

there are lots of tutorials, here, so i've got tons of reading to do. only now i noticed there's a "Introduce yourself" thanks to your signature. i'll go there.
(any faith no more fans in here...? )