Is learning multiple programming languages at the same time distracting?

I've been working writing fairly small applications and doing some maintenance work for some not so small applications at a company the last year, for a fairly large client.

It's been a bit hectic this last year and i've worked with:

• C# ASP.NET (My Favorite So Far)
• Lotus Domino (My Least Favourite.. massive understatement)
• MSSQL server and MySQL
• Visual Basic .NET
• Visual Basic for Applications (Excel Scripting)
• Some PHP
• A Java Framework (Really more of an XML Configuration Framework)
• All the usual web stuff (HTML CSS JS)

After all of that in my first year开发者_Go百科 in the industry my head is crammed full of info..

I am currently studying for a Microsoft certification in .NET, however the course focuses on windows forms in .NET 2.0,

I am looking to expand my skillset as i feel like i have around an intermediate knowlege of ASP.NET and a fairly basic knowlege of most other things ive worked with..

My .NET Knowledge however is mostly 2.0 with some .NET 3 (linq and other techniques) tacked on top.

I am looking now to try and over the next few months finish my Microsoft certification (which is in visual basic) and get fully versed in ASP.NET 4.0 and ASP.NET MVC, I also want to focus on ruby on rails a lot so i can offer solution development for both large scale and smaller clients.

Will it make it much harder to learn visual basic .NET 2.0 C #.NET 4 and Ruby on Rails at the same time?

My goal is around February 2011 to have finished my certification have a good knowledge of ASP.NET 4.0 and a mediumish knowledge of rails it seems like a big push but im a fairly quick learner..

Sorry if this questions been a bit lengthy!

Thanks

Daniel

Wow i love stack overflow, its been like an hour and i have some really great answers!

Thanks everyone.. Thats what i thought, I find picking up a new language fairly easy cause ive done the whole intro to programming including pointers =P

i think its just the details that i trip up on but i should be able to hone that by February!

Thanks

In my opinion

I think the main thing to obtain when studying programming is not the languages, but to understand the concepts, the fine points and the underlying gremlins that do all the bits and pieces.

We were taught Java at university but the lecturer didn't care if we got the code wrong. In exams we were free to answer questions in an language of our choice or even pseudo code. (Of course you may not have this luxury). But this approach made us focus on what was happening and how rather than the 10-20 lines of code making it happen.

I think the main thing to learn is understanding of what's happening behind the scenes.

The concepts of

• Object Oriented programming
• Polymorphism
• OO vs Procedural languages (know the differences)
• How objects you write are created behind the scenes
• Problem solving
• Architecture and design etc etc

Concepts at a more programming level

• Declaration and instantiation Loops
• If Then Else statements as well as case statements
• Parameters
• functions/methods/procedures
• recursion etc etc

Of course you will probably learn all these concepts while studying one language. But if you understand the concepts behind the language, you'll probably find it really easy to pick up any language after that, because you're transferring the understanding and then just understanding syntactic differences in many cases. And of course every language has its own intricacies and differences but you'll find it much easier to understand if you can already do the basics - at worst with a quick google to pick up the syntactic differences.

Don't ever limit yourself to one language. But if you don't understand the core, knowing 100 languages is not really that impressive.

Also remember that in this field, it's amazing because you never stop learning. There's always new and awesome ways to do things, that will drive us mad and keep us coming back to SO :)

I totally disagree with Preet. Do you only take one class at a time at University? No. Why? Because your mind is capable of learning multiple things at once. In fact when I was in high school I took Latin and French at the same time and doing so helped tremendously.

So too learning multiple computer languages at the same time can be of great use. Your mind won't start to think that language X's way of doing things is the only way so your problem solving skills won't be so rigidly tied to one language's methodologies. You'll have a much more fluid understanding of programming and you will be a better programmer for it.

Pick one thing and learn it until you get bored - then move on. You'll probably know more than most in that topic.

Well, learning multiple languages simultaneously isn't bad. But, you mentioned that you're targeting certifications and want to finish by Feb. I would suggest to set main focus on certification and learn Ruby on Rails when bored to take a break.