What's after PHP?

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What Should I Learn After PHP?

Ive been doing PHP for the past 2 years and I'm quite comfortable with it, I can do most things and I'm finding it harder to find challenges. Which is good I suppose.

But as I become more experienced I'm hearing bad things about it. That in the grand scheme of programming it's a baby.

So what would you recommend I move on to? I thought mabey Java or C. But you guys are the experts. What do you think?

Also, could you suggest some good places to learn.

Answer 1

What about participating in some kind of Open Source project ? Now that you have some experience, you would probably be able to help doing nice stuff ;-)

It would also be a rewarding / interesting experience :

• not working alone is often better -- you learn more stuff, and you are more motivated
• working on a big OSS project looks nice on a resume, too ;-)

Answer 2

It depends on what you want to do, you choose the right tool for the job. PHP is a fine choice for rapid web development.

However, even if your day job requires you to stick with PHP, learning another language by doing some toy projects will actually improve the way you write PHP. Pick a language, try it out for a few months, then try out another!

Answer 3

Take anything you hear about PHP with a pinch of salt. Whilst it can be used as a simple scripting language, you can write entire object-oriented web applications with it (PHP5 adds massively to this).

PHP is my language of choice for many web projects - and not just because it's the one I know best, I've been using C#.NET, ASP.NET and WPF for much longer than I've been using PHP).

Answer 4

It depends on why you want to move really. Are you looking to get past PHPs alleged flaws and produce better webapps, are you wanting to improve your programming ability/style/technique or do you want to learn a different style of programming?

You probably only want to learn C if you intend to move away from web-development. Java probably isn't going to teach you anything that you don't already know from PHP, assuming you write OO PHP code of course.

Learning one of Python/Ruby/Javascript would let you learn about functional programming - if that's your goal.