As a developer in India, Undergraduate with around a few years of working in C for a large multinational company(translate: less of development and more of sustenance and debugging) and no other development experience, the realization that people on the internet are REALLY GOOD at what they do, a desire to be the same and a will to see it through.<p>How the heck do people get started?!!! How do I start?!! What are the skills in demand that I should aim to build? Basically,how to be a better developer??
I won't speak harshly of C or C++.<p>In my opinion you need to specialize in either java or .net to make a career of it.<p>On the topic of programming languages, general knowledge asserts that a programmer should at least be able to program in each of the following 'types' of programming languages:<p><i>Procedural - C/Go etc.<p></i>Object-oriented - C#/Java etc.<p><i>Dynamic - Python/Ruby/Groovy etc.<p></i>Functional - F#/R/Haskell etc.<p>A lot of languages cross boundaries (ex. php is procedural and object-oriented) - some programming languages can be all of the above-mentioned tyes.<p>The real 'trick' to get started is to specialise in development frameworks. It's all about rapid application development nowadays.<p>There are a ton of frameworks available for traditional desktop and web development, including: WinForms, WCF, WPF, ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, Django, Rails, Grails and a ton more of opensource frameworks.