Whether you are a wet lab biologist wanting to add some bioinformatics skills to your toolbox or if you are trying to get all the way into bioinformatics and make your own software, I have some concrete recommendations about what programming languages to start with. I focus on R, Python, and Bash for beginners, and I also consider in what circumstances you should consider adding other languages, including C, C++, Ruby, Java, PHP, JavaScript, and Matlab.