Is ruby good for beginner ?

Question

I am completely new at programing and I started learning ruby a week ago, but I don't know if it is a good way to start.
I chose ruby because it looks like it is the simplest one. So can you tell me what's the best language to start and what I should do next ?

Answer 1

Ruby is very simplified on the outside, with immensely complex but fast internals. It is a superb programming language, but I'd say that too many crucial aspects of programming that one would want to get hold of would be implicit towards a learner.

For me, I'd opt for something more explicit, something which would require me to tell more things to the program in order to solve a problem.

Lets say I want to get the last element of an array.

- For a high-level language, you just tell the program to output array[-1].
- For a low-level language, you need to tell the program to get the size of the array, and then output array[size - 1].

While the former is easier, you learn more by doing the latter. I suggest C++, or Java. There may be a steep learning curve, but you will benefit from it later on. :>
However, if you think those are too hardcore to start from, Python may be appropriate. While it is also a high-level language, it would be perfectly fine as a starting point for learners since few of the great programmers I know also started off from Python.

* I hope I won't be stoned to death for not including JavaScript in this post. Just for the record, JS is more inclined towards web programming, used together with HTML and CSS. If that's your thing *

Answer 2

Thank you for the answer, that was helpful, I will think about it.
PS : I am more interested in creating applications or little games.

Answer 3

python also, but ruby nice
. . .

and learn a low level lang like c or c++