You can organize your life, create games, build a website, write a program to do your homework, run a donation site for your school food drive--the limit to what you can do is really only where your imagination ends.
For Example...
Here's a routine to print out a list of your CDs in PHP:
Do you have to use more than one programming language to do a given task?
Sometimes you might mix something like JavaScript and PHP when you're building a web application: Javascript might handle display issues--what the user sees on the screen--and the PHP would get your information from the database. Most times, when building a large application, you don't mix languages, which is why it's important to know the strengths and weaknesses of a language before you sit down to code.
What programming language should you use?
It depends on what you want to accomplish. Some jobs are ideal for a language like PHP (which started out as a way for one gentleman to keep his Web page, but has become one of the fastest growing languages in the world), others call for Java, and you can do almost anything in Perl (sometimes called the Swiss Army knife of programming languages). Read about the different programs at Webmonkey.
What are proprietary languages?
Proprietary languages are owned by a big company. The "Microsoft" languages, for example, are made ideally to run on Windows desktops and/or servers. These include Visual Basic, ASP (Active Server Pages - for websites) and C#.
One of the best things about choosing a programming language that isn't proprietary (i.e., owned by a large company) is that there are many more resources for you online and in bookstores for you to learn from at little or no cost, from the comfort of your own home.
You can organize your life, create games, build a website, write a program to do your homework, run a donation site for your school food drive--the limit to what you can do is really only where your imagination ends.
