Oli on “Do I Want to Learn Java?”
Java is an excellent classroom language. It has fairly good ideas about classes, inheritance, polymorphism, abstraction and even generics. Those are all things you get a fairly skewed perspective about from a language like PHP. That's what makes Java a very popular language being taught at universities.
C# (one of MS's .net languages) is very much like it. There are a few different keywords and the package structure is quite different but the syntax and ideas are all the same gag. By learning Java to a fairly high standard, writing C# should seem like a walk in the park.
You also get familiar with the C syntax which means Java can be a perfect gateway to something like C++ too.
How is that relevant? Because between Java and .net, you account for a massive proportion of the technology jobs