Whether you are watching videos on YouTube, networking with business partners on LinkedIn or reading an article on Wikipedia, these large, frequently visited websites generally run smoothly. The question of what scripts are running in the background and how they have been programmed usually only arises when you want to create a website yourself. Web development requires a number of decisions to be made beforehand. For example, you need to consider whether you need to choose a good programming language, whether you want to hire a developer who has the skills you need or whether, as a programmer yourself, you need to choose a web programming language which would enhance your knowledge and improve your portfolio.

Web programming languages can be used to define complex logical instructions and processes. While markup languages such as HTML can only be used to generate documents, you can use programming languages to create programs of any size to meet your needs. So what programming languages are especially good for use with the web? What are they used for? Which languages are the most versatile, and which are fairly easy for programmers to learn? These article's overview of web development languages will answer these questions.