what's a good 'language' to learn for scripting?

littlejoe5

SOLVED: If I want to learn a computer language to use in scripting, what language would be best? I have written a few short scripts in 'bash' (I don't know if that is consider a computer language). But I see some discussions about perl, python, etc. and they seem to be more powerful - or is that just an illusion?

If you can suggest tome a good language for that purpose, can you also suggest a good source of understandable documentation, and/ or simple and thorough tutorial or book to study it?

Thanks

mfillpot

Each scripting language including the shells has their uses and most people mix and match to best fit their goal, I recommend focusing on bash to learn the potential and limitations, then you can move on to perl which has a great library of shared functions in cpan for you to learn from and use to save development time.

marc

littlejoe5 wrote:

If I want to learn a computer language to use in scripting, what language would be best? I have written a few short scripts in 'bash' (I don't know if that is consider a computer language). But I see some discussions about perl, python, etc. and they seem to be more powerful - or is that just an illusion?

If you can suggest tome a good language for that purpose, can you also suggest a good source of understandable documentation, and/ or simple and thorough tutorial or book to study it?

Thanks

That depends on what you wanna use the language for.

Anyway if I am to say some... I'd learn bash or perl

odlevakp

BASH is pretty universal and powerful, but if you want something mightier I would suggest Python. You can use it for simple scripts, but also for complex applications, it's really easy to learn and if you come across a 6 months old script you will still know what it does (unlike Perl )

asedt

What language is the best and whats is the most powerful? Why would you want the best and the most powerful? And not the one that you got most use of or that is easiest to learn. If you think about it like that you see that it all depends on what you what to do.

You have a nice list here that ranks all languages, not only script languages (use it to get a hint): http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/

Python has a lot of documentation at: http://www.python.org/doc/

littlejoe5

Thanks for all of your answers. Looks like it's a huge subject, but you've given me some starting points

asedt

I found some more links that may be useful if you looking for documentation or tutorials:

http://www.gnu.org/s/bash/manual/
http://www.perl.org/docs.html
http://www.php.net/

Collection of tutorials in JavaScript, PHP etc:
http://www.tizag.com/

ben

Start with BASH, then move to python

dwclarke

Can recommend these for learning Bash:

http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/

http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-Guide/html/index.html

marc

dwclarke wrote:

Can recommend these for learning Bash:

http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/

http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-Guide/html/index.html

ARGGG that's so full of mistakes!!!

Better check:

http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide

kiran.kankipati

Learn PHP in 1 week, then also BASH.

PHP gives you extreme ease of use, than any other scripting language.

Although I come from core systems network protocol development background (that is C/C++), still recently after learning PHP, for all user-space app. extensions + other automations, I use PHP. I code bash scripts within PHP. So that is my suggestion.