Is C good after PHP ? Or not?

[Carter12]

Hello,
I need some advice from some of the more expert programmers on what path should I take further in my learning process. I started with PHP and now I can say I do ok, not an expert of course.
I like programming very much and I love PHP, it's a great language, but I think I would like to work with something that is a bit different, more challenging, something maybe not related to web exclusively.
Developing software, working on drivers, GUI apps (for Windows too) really excites me.
I don't wanna work excusively under Windows (I'm not a big fan of M$) though I've heard a lot of positive things about how great C# and the .NET framework are.
So my question is, what would you guys recommend me as a future programming language ? I was thinking about C and Java and C# actually(even with my dislike for M$), not so much C++ since I've seen that nowadays Java is used more instead.

What would you choose ? I like to know that I'm learning something upon which I can benefit in the future years to come (maybe find a job with). I'm willing to learn, so I don't think that will be a problem.

Would you suggest a differend language that I did not mention? Which?

[jephthah]

definitely learn C. it's very structured and widely applicable.

[Carter12]

What are your thoughts on Java or C# ?

[omol]

PHP is based on the C programming language, so it is a pretty logical step to take.

C# and the dotnet framework are great for putting out applications in a very short amount of time and will save you thousands of lines of mundane repetitive code. But you still need an understanding of C to use C# efficiently.

Java - Personally I'm not a huge fan as its easy to create large applications, but they tend to be slower than the same application developed in C. It runs on all major OS's, but then again anal sex works on all genders.

You still don't have to give up on PHP either, you can create desktop applications in PHP with the PHP-GTK.