What are the most popular coding languages for website development?

I'm currently in ';training'; (independent study) to be able to make beautiful, interactive websites. I'll consider myself generally fluent in XHTML and CSS, however... what comes next? I was planning to go ahead and jump into JavaScript, however all sorts of languages are popping up left and right:





PHP, SQL, Ajax, Java, Rails, C++, C#...





For creating beautiful, interactive (and safe and secure!) websites, what do I turn to?What are the most popular coding languages for website development?
Most popular Client side languages would be Javascript (and it's children languages like Jquery and AJAX) and HTML (XHTML, HTML 4.01 all in the same category).





The most popular Server sides depends on what you're working on. The government likes to use ASP.NET for their stuff and PHP is free so people like to use it the most I would say. PHP is amazing, I'm in the middle of learning it now and it's fairly easy. I would have to say PHP is the most popular server side language.





-BillyWhat are the most popular coding languages for website development?
I would choose C# ASP.Net 3.5, because I think it is one of the better solutions.





I've seen Banks, Cities and Government systems coded in C#, so I'm sure it can handle whatever website you need it to do. (VB.Net is easier on the beginners, though.)





I would recommend you avoid PHP, choose Java/Python if you don't like C# or VB.Net
I love PHP, it's amazing. Naturally.





And I'd say it's the most popular as well.
There are 4 completely different concepts here.





Javascript and it's child, Asynchronous Javascript (Ajax) are both client-side scripting in the browser- stuff you do with them creates dynamic webpages and everything is done on the end-user's computer. This is good if you want to put fancy effects on the webpage and what not, as well as do some processing locally.





Java and C# are like Actionscript (Adobe Flash)- they're used to make programs that run inside web pages, but they are not used in webpages by themselves. They require people to download a program to make them run (Java Runtime and Silverlight respectively).





PHP and Ruby on Rails (the Ruby language with the Rails web framework), along with Perl and Python (2 you didn't mention here) are used for server-side scripting. This is the same type of scripting as ASP.NET (which is written in any .NET language, including VIsual Basic and C#). What this does is have the sever decide what webpage to give the user. This is used in systems like Facebook and webmail pages where you want to give different pages to different people. It's a lot more secure than using javascript to serve up the webpage.





SQL is a specialty language- it's used almost exclusively for storing and retreiving data in databases. You can't use this on it's own and you should try not to use it directly. This is one of the things that a good server-side web framework like Ruby On Rails and Django (for Python) will get rid of for you.





C++ is used primarily for desktop programming and you really shouldn't use it for web programming. C++ programs are generally faster than those in these other, interpreted languages but C++ makes you deal with things on a much lower level than those other languages so you have to deal with things like memory management.





What you should do is some combination of the first 2. Use Javascript to create a beautiful web page but use a server-side framework like Ruby on Rails or PHP for the behind-the-scenes stuff like storing user names and passwords and choosing what each person can see.