I don’t recommend doing c/c++. It’s very hard to build anything useful if you’re starting out and has very limited application in the DevOps world. My advice is python, do something with boto3, e.g. start by just deploying micro ec2 instances in aws, and terminate them by hand, then build from there. As long as you only deploy one at a time you’ll be in the free tier, so your script could check if there is already one running and alert rather than deploy another. This is a pretty good real world DevOps exercise as a lot of my work has been writing against the aws api. Another great DevOps exercise is to write groovy scripts to run on Jenkins pipelines, another real world application, e.g. try putting a file into an S3 bucket doing that. C/c++, golang or java might just confuse you to start with, python will get you started and you can decide where to go from there. Also recommend you run all your scripts in docker as python on a native machine gets version clashes etc. Best of luck.

Hell yes.

• Python is the best language for fast scripting and automation.

• Also it is a popular language for various automation tools (Ansible, Pulumi for example.).

• There is a python library for just about anything you'll need in your job.

Last not least, Python is just so fun to work with