Novice, Project, Language to learn?

Hello everyone.

I am a complete and utter novice. I have never programmed anything before.

I have a project that is very important to me and would make my life much easier.

to give you an example of how the program should run i am going to explain it in a very simple fashion.

Suppose the program was about "cars"

the layout or the main page of this program once you double click it has to have two buttons on it. one says "search" and one says "browse".

If you click on the "Search" button you will go to another "page?" that has 5 or 6 spaces in it to do the search "Manufacturer" "Model" "Year" "Type"...etc. and you can use one or more or even all of these criteria to do a search. and once you click on the "Find" button you a page will pop up with a profile of the car you are looking for with images and text, or a message that says "The Profile You Are Looking For Does Not Exist" or something like that, you know.

Now, If you Press the "Browse" Button, You will go to a page with no search options, but other Buttons, giving the continent where the cars are or were built "Asia" "Europe" "North America"...etc.

Then, once you choose a continent by pressing its button, you will go to another page with countries. for instance when you press "Asia" you will find "Japan", "South Korea", "China"...etc.

Then you will find the manufacturer then the year then the model.

This is an example of course because the program will not be used for cars.

Thank you very much in advance for your time, responses and patience.

Well there is no simple answer of which language you should learn to complete this project. but you need to understand that the application you are discussing is a simple database application so you should use a language that already has built in libraries for communicating with a database.

Then consider what platform you are targeting(Desktop application, browser based, mobile phone, etc.) Then you can see which languages are capable of meeting your goals and choose the one that suites you best.

With that said let me say my opinion may be biased because i am a PHP programmer.

Basically you have two options that i feel are best suited for you. First is PHP/MySQL. This will offer a web based application that can be accessed by any computer phone or tablet with a modern web browser. The down side is that you will have to learn a markup language such as HTML to build the user interface.

The second option is Visual Basic.NET which will offer a desktop application through the .net runtime environment. This is a simple language to learn and can access microsoft access databases along with MSSQL or simple CSV files. The user interface is developed through a drag and drop IDE.

However if you are looking to do this for just one application it will be much easier to hire a developer. just saying! but if you are looking to learn a language to also continue into further projects by all means go for it.