In my opinion, a good beginner's language is one which teaches both common programming constructs and basic underlying computing architecture (e.g. the hows and the whys). Visual Basic has all of the common programming constructs of other 'beginner' languages ( the canonical being C ), and hence is as good a beginner language as any. However, I've usually seen Visual Basic taught in a manner which pushes beginning developers into quickly writing GUI apps which use complicated classes based on deep inheritance hierarchies which a beginner has no chance of understanding.
As a case in point, my father recently took a VB.net course from an online 'university'. The prerequisites for the course where essentially nill (Programming Concepts or some such crap) and it was clear that this was to be taught as a first programming course. From the beginning, the focus was entirely on the GUI capabilities of VB.net and it quickly led into VBs database capabilities and other such applications. These were all fine and dandy but the entire class was completely lost as to the most basic of programming concepts. The class completely failed to explain basics such as memory layout, memory management, basic class structure, etc, etc. As a result, the only way most of these students could 'learn' was by cutting and pasting working examples into there apps and using trial and error to get them working. By the end of the course, I'd say they knew no more programming basics than at the beginning.
Based on this experience, I'd strongly advocate learning a language like C before jumping into Java, VB, C# or what have you. Once you learn something like C effectively, you'll find that many of the same problems pop up with more advanced languages.
Slashdot Mirror
In my opinion, a good beginner's language is one which teaches both common programming constructs and basic underlying computing architecture (e.g. the hows and the whys). Visual Basic has all of the common programming constructs of other 'beginner' languages ( the canonical being C ), and hence is as good a beginner language as any. However, I've usually seen Visual Basic taught in a manner which pushes beginning developers into quickly writing GUI apps which use complicated classes based on deep inheritance hierarchies which a beginner has no chance of understanding.
As a case in point, my father recently took a VB.net course from an online 'university'. The prerequisites for the course where essentially nill (Programming Concepts or some such crap) and it was clear that this was to be taught as a first programming course. From the beginning, the focus was entirely on the GUI capabilities of VB.net and it quickly led into VBs database capabilities and other such applications. These were all fine and dandy but the entire class was completely lost as to the most basic of programming concepts. The class completely failed to explain basics such as memory layout, memory management, basic class structure, etc, etc. As a result, the only way most of these students could 'learn' was by cutting and pasting working examples into there apps and using trial and error to get them working. By the end of the course, I'd say they knew no more programming basics than at the beginning. Based on this experience, I'd strongly advocate learning a language like C before jumping into Java, VB, C# or what have you. Once you learn something like C effectively, you'll find that many of the same problems pop up with more advanced languages.