What is the best programming language to learn by a layperson?

I am fairly adept at computers, but am finding out that I must learn a program if I want to automate tasks in office (visual basic i believe) and am really interested in learning how to automate websites. But what language is the best for me to start learning? I have limited time to spend, so have to really hit the right one off the bat.

What is the best programming language to learn by a layperson?
Doug mentioned Visual Basic as an easy to learn language. I would agree but you would be limited by supported browsers, ie. Internet explorer only.





I suggest you read up on javascript. It is similar to visual basic, but is the standard scripting language for all browsers. An added bonus of learning javascript is that it is basically the same as actionscript as used in Adobe Flash. Adobe recently released the actionscript engine to Mozilla which is being built into Firefox for a future release.





Articles:


http://www.sitepoint.com/article/javascr...


http://www.sitepoint.com/article/javascr...


http://www.sitepoint.com/article/javascr...


http://www.sitepoint.com/article/painles...





Reference:


http://www.w3schools.com/js/


http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Jav...


http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/DOM





Sitepoint javascript forum:


http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/forumdis...
Reply:Java. Easy, robust, costless, runs everywhere and there's plenty of free information about it. And it's done for the Web.
Reply:Java is NOT easy to learn. It is extremely strict with casting, data types, and case sensetivity.





The easist language to learn (BY A LONG MARGIN) is Visual Basic. the .NET version is object oriented, but the intelli-sense in the VS editor, copled with it's easy casing rules and HUGE amount of doccumentation make it the easiet.





Before all of you Java kings out there have a COW, I did not say it was the BEST language. It is; however, the easiest to learn.
Reply:Start by learning Classic ASP for beginners. You can learn VB.NET. Do a search for VB.NET tutorials or Classic ASP tutorials. Or go to w3schools.com to learn both.





I use C#.NET, which if you learn both, you will find that they are very similar in syntax in more ways then none.

anther