Starting to Learn Programming but which language?

If you are programming for the iPhone then you are pretty much restricted to Objective-C. You will need a Mac to do the programming on and you will have to join the Apple Developer Project (at an annual cost of $90) if you want to run the programs on a real iPhone.

for a starter program I highly advice going with something lighter than an iPhone app. these apps would require heavy programming experience and uses advanced concepts (imagine people having to get degrees to be able to do these things)


I would suggest going with a web app instead. something easy like html+javascript combo will give you the basic programming principles such as variables, controls, loops, etc...

if you wanna go deeper you can look into server side scripting like php, asp, etc..


you should be able to find tons of tools and tutorials on these without paying a dime. and if you really want to do some iphone related stuff, you can make your web apps iphone compatible too  

iPhone programming is not really that difficult, but it's not for beginners. Mind, I wouldn't recommend any OS X programming for beginners either. There's nothing on the Mac that comes near the ease of learning of Visual C# or VisualBasic on Windows IMO.

protip: either c or vb6

c will take longer to get your head around but is better in the long run
vb6 requires getting a hold of ms visual studio 6 which isnt officialy available anymore but vb is a very easy language to learn with lots of dox in the interbutts for you to read

If you're going for Visual Basic (and no reason why not), why not go for the latest version? It's freely available.

if you are going for the .net version of vb (visual studio 2003 and higher) bear in mind its near enough a different language to vb6 which is truer to troditional basic

And it's all the better for that. A far better language for a beginner to learn. Traditional Basic was a truely awful language.