dont know if the above test will let people know the whole idea or not, so here is the whole story. I am a network specialist student. i am new to IT. I am going back to school on the unemployment grant and IT seems like a great field to get into. I do not know any programming languages. I am at the time trying to teach myself html, css, java, ajax, and php just for kicks. i do not plan on using it to get a job. i cant think with that part of my brain to a DESIGN or CREATE, but i can however troubleshoot. thus the net tech and not web development. i just had this idea that if i were familiar with, even if i still had no clue of how to use the previously named langauges, i would be better off having some familiarity with the look of code, how to navigate through it etc and also get over the fear of looking at it, geesh. code can be intimidating when you first look at it-especially when you have no idea what you are looking at lol. so anyway, are there any programming languages i should pick up a book on and get to know as a net tech? i hear that Perl is a server langauge, is this true? maybe that would be one. Thank you all for any input.

If I were in your position, I would first acquire competence with shell scripting and one general purpose high level language.

Since you aren't the programmer, you need to be able to deal with the most commonly used setups, tools, languages, etc. For a high level language, you should know Perl and Python. I heavily program in Python, but if I had to take up work as a network analyst, I would pick up Perl too. And if I happened to know Perl only, then I would pick up Python.

I'm actually assuming that you would be mostly working on UNIX like boxes, like BSDs, Linuxes, Macs, etc.. I don't think you'll see Perl in common usage on Windows, for example. if you don't know which OS type to focus on, UNIX like machines is a good default. Python however does tend to be used on both operating systems easily.

Then there's shell scripting. Actually, the shells, and various OS utilities varies from OS to OS, and the idiosyncracies are obviously important in a job, when you actually have to get work done correctly and quickly. There's no way you can learn about them all at once, so what you should do is focus on one you can learn on, and then relearn as needed when you work on a different OS.

On this note, I would wait for your school to give you further information. If for example, they teach you to work on Solaris boxes, you probably want to know this before getting started. If you're impatient to learn something before school starts, I would setup a Linux machine, and then start learning your way around it. Just becoming comfortable with the OS is going to take you some time, and then you focus on learning how to administer it.