Java is one of the most revolutionary languages that the last decade
brought to us, like a holy grail to all of us coders... absolute
portability of the 'almost full' OOP code to the multiple different
architectures and operating systems, universal SWING GUI with the
'chameleon' abilities to change it's skin and feel under the temper
of the coder, fully CORBA compatible, all together with the RMI, and
like a cream to a cake, a JDBC for the database connections through
the Java. Java is far from small applets running in the browser,
with some fancy animation. This is Java well known for all of us,
but Java is much more, Java is whole environment, like a wrapper
around OS. All this sounds too good? Well, in fact yes, there is
only one leap that keeps Java from becoming a major coders tool, in
fact, several leaps; speed and hardware manipulation.
C/C++ is a really powerful language due to the flexibility and low
level handling that u can do. A sound knowledge of C / C++ is desirable to give Java a shot.
Perl is a very simple, but very effective scripting language, it's
power lies in the fact that Perl is highly flexible and powerful.
Perl is probably the best scripting language for text processing,
and because of that, Perl is widely used on internet for CGI. Perl's
usage is not restricted only to CGI and console applications on
UNIX-like systems, but there are ports that enable Perl to be used
for writing, as an example, Xwindow applications. But like any other
application, because Perl code is interpreted, results will be
slower than adequate compiled code. No matter that fact, Perl is
still very commonly used by coders that find it's flexibility and
power wrapped in simplicity, especially in text processing where
Perl has showed even more than to us well known C/C++. If you need a
CGI code that is fast to write and easy to maintain, Perl will
definitely suite your needs.
