I'm thinking of becoming a web developer. What's the best server side language to learn first?

I definitely recommend Python. Python is both incredibly easy to understand and learn as well as extremely powerful. Also with frameworks like Django or Flask, you can get up and developing very quickly and the support community is huge.

Also, the Django documentation is probably the best I've seen. We use Django at Mahalo and I have very few complaints. PHP is a good language, but in my opinion, none of the current frameworks for it can beat newer frameworks like Ruby on Rails or Django.

As a web developer myself I must say PHP is a great place to start. Although, I don't use it as much as my new favorite language ColdFusion, I recommend PHP because it gets it's roots from C and if you decide to go in more of an actual "app" development it will be great for you. A great website to go to learn php is PHPVIDEOTUTORIALS.com They have many free tutorials that will help you.

I would go with both of the above - php and python. PHP is extremely flexible, and there's a lot of stuff it lets you get away with. Python is fully object oriented, so if you'd prefer to learn server side scripting from an object oriented approach, this may be better for you.

Php lets you do it either way, straight line by line code or object oriented. In case you're not familiar with object oriented programming, you can refer to this tutorial including all the other chapters following this one: aonaware.com/OOP2.htm -- shyam.

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