Fayimora and pple on NL,i need ur advise..am an engineering student(undergraduate)and i am seriously considering in going into IT world..i av decided to learn Oracle 11g but i was advised to learn programming first.i did theoretical aspect of PASCAL in my 200L days but i'm nt interested in pascal..whch prog lang can you pls recommend for me to learn before doing my database course and pls state the reason why(i am just a beginner)...a response will be highly appreciated

Pascal's old stuff, you can go for C++/Python/Java(desktop software development) or PHP(web dev.)

You should also consider others advice

But is it necessary for me to learn html before php?

g9kate: Pascal's old stuff, you can go for C++/Python/Java(desktop software development) or PHP(web dev.)

You should also consider others advice

If you are going for PHP that means you want to be a web developer, Else you can go for C++/Python or Java for real programming.

You need HTML knowledge to start PHP because PHP is meant for the WEB and HTML is the language the browser understands. Whether you like it or not in your PHP programming life you must in-cooperate HTML at some point.

Other Web scripting languages are Python, Ruby and as I said earlier PHP.

PHP and Python are easier to start. But as for me I started with PHP.
HTML is not a programming language you can learn that in less than 3weeks and understand go to www.w3schools.com and follow the lessons on HTML.