Hi there!

I am a new programmer, still learning the basics, and very confused. I don't know what type of programming language would be best for whatever the situation or problem is.

For instance, I want to write some type of program that will allow me to take data from another program and plug it into some type of spreadsheet, that will be posted on a website. I can easily pull the data and plug it into an Excel worksheet and then post that on the website, but I'm more complicated and difficult than that. I want to be able to just press buttons, and it automatically finds the information for me, plugs it into a spreadsheet that can be viewed by others.

Ok...for example...

We have servers and we need to find out what the down times are for them each day. We usually go to another website to pull the data from (running Linux code) and then just write it in an e-mail, only the amount of data we pull is great, so it becomes a great pain to type the information, tab, type the information, tab...you get the point. This is what I want it to do...I want to be able to press a button that says "XW1" Server (that should be able to run some type of query on the website that pulls the data) and then it should be able to pull that data and put it in some type of format that people can view and read.

ANY ideas??? Ok...i know that is all confusing, so much easier if I were able to show you, I'm sooooooo sorry if it's confusing, i just want to know what type of program i should use...and what exactly is an application program????? thanks a whole bunch for even getting this far in my confusing post!!!

p.s. i am EXTREMELY computer illiterate...so I would greatly appreciate it if y'all can explain in non-computer terms...hahaha...sorry

There's any number of programming languages you could use for that.

From the sounds of it, you're querying a database. Depending on the server platform, you could use several languages. If you're running MS SQL server, Visual Basic might be your best choice. For Linux, running pretty much any database backend, you might be better off learning Perl, Python, or maybe even PHP. All three of those languages have superb text processing capabilities. I'm not too sure about VB, but I'd be surprised if its capabilities in that realm were limited. Of course, all of these languages would probably require a knowledge of SQL queries, too.

I'm not a big programmer, but I'd like to think I can conceptualize pretty well. If you're wanting to do something quickly, and you need it to be pointy-clicky, you might want to look at VB, or even VBA (visual basic for applications) if you want to integrate it into Excel. When you're working with Microsoft products, one strenght that they have is that they make EVERYTHING of their talk to everything else they have-- I wouldn't be surprised if you could export your Microsoft flight simulator itinerary into Excel, or plan out your Age of Empires attack plan using PowerPoint!

But again, it really depends on what your setup is like. That should determine how to proceed. From there, if you need to evaluate your options, pick the language you're most familiar with. If your familiarity level with the options is low, then it becomes a matter of looking at each, and deciding which one either interests you more, or which one looks easiest to learn.