Rigby5

Comments should explain why something is to be done, not what is being done. Maintaining comments is not a second job, it is the FIRST job. You should always write the comments before you write any code at all. And similarly, you change the comments before you change any code. The reason is because if you only write code for yourself and don't make it obvious through comments, no one else if going to every use it, and it will just be thrown away. Code I write is still being used 30 years later, because I made sure anyone can understand it easily.

Sensi is correct. However, if you simply want to read up on DLL's, then Microsoft has all the documentation on lline, as MSDN (Microsoft Developer's Network). But I think you will find there are just too many, and you likely need to narrow down to some subset, like are you interested in using MFC or ATL? https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/1ez7dh12.aspx

No, Java is not frequently used. There are large enterprise situations where they already have a team supporting Java, so they also want to do all their web development in Java, so some web development is done in Java, but not much. In fact, most places I worked, like Intel, HP, and even parts of IBM, do not allow any Java installation. They consider it a security risk and requiring too much memory. A single person maintaining their own learning site should not get bogged down installing and maintaining Java, which would not at all help them learn programming or developing web sites. From your own link is it obvious Java is a poor choice as it is more complex than necessary, compared to something simple like PHP. {... 1.4. Java web or Java EE container Java web applications are typically not running directly on the server. Java web applications are running inside a web container on the server. The container provides a runtime environment for Java web applications. The container is for Java web applications what the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) is for local running Java applications. The container itself runs in the JVM. In general, Java distinguishes two containers: the web container and the Java EE container. Typical web containers in the Java world are Tomcat or Jetty. A web container supports the execution of Java servlets and JavaServer Pages. A Java EE container supports additional functionality, for example, distribution of server load. Most of the modern Java web frameworks are based on servlets. Popular Java web frameworks are GWT, JavaServer Faces, Struts and the Spring framework. These web frameworks usually require as a minimum container a web container. ...}

Python is a scripting language, is not a real programming language, and by preventing direct operating system calls, makes one less familiar with the operating system calls and real programming. Functional programming is even less real, and is just a communications notation between different programs, such as a query language like SQL. Do not start with a scripting language or functional language because they have no future since no one sells programs that use them. They are only in-house tools for people who do not know how to really program. The only language to start on is C. That is because all operating systems, compilers, browsers, databases, network protocols, drivers, and embedded software is all written in C. Then later you can move up to C++, which is what most games and big applications are written in. C is the easiest language, because it has the smallest vocabulary of reserved words to memorize. About 35 or so.

Web development is not really ordinary programming. In web programming, the client is actually running the browser, such as Chrome or FireFox, and that is sending page requests to Apache Tomcat at a server, and the web developer has to compose html pages using css and other notational aids, to describe what the browser should render. The main programming then is just JavaScript macros you send to the browser to modify mouse events and things like that. You are really composing in developer languages instead of traditional programming. But to do web development, PHP, MySQL, and JQuery are good. JavaScript is more than just the JQuery library, so is also good. But Java is not for web development. It is more of an enterprise business programming language, except on Android devices. JavaScript is not really related to Java at all. Some people like JavaScript so much they also use it on the server side, with Node.js, but that is not the common convention. You can also use a framework that does most of the work for you, like Drupal, Wordpress, etc. If you do start with a framework, it pays to eventually understand what the framework is doing, so that you can hand tailor or modify as necessary later. I don't consider frameworks to be really sufficient or flexible enough, but they are fast to get something up and running, and can be instructive.