RE: Recommendations for a newcomer?

Alright, the first thing to recognize which you probably are aware is that
nobody is going to hire you without experience. Unless you have 3 or 3
years of solid experience in any language or system, nobody is going to
touch you.

About the only way to get into any language or system is to side slip your
way in. (Work in a company with the system and get yourself transferred
there or work your way into it).

That being said look around and you will see that for every AS/400 or
iSeries job there is thousands of Java, PHP or C# or VB.net jobs so
obviously that is where your chances are going to be better.

You said you were working in Linux so that would mean to me that is your
best bet and that would point you to Java or PHP or Ruby on Rails or Grail
or something like that. C# and VB.Net don't run on Linux so I would look at
what your company is doing. Java? PHP.

Not sure what lead you to the iSeries and why you want to work on
it.Virtually nothing for AS/400 in the Bay Area but then there are few and
far between everywhere. Best bets are the mid-west or east coast but again
you must have years of experience before any will talk to you.

If you do not have experience as a programmer start with a language like
Java. An excellent place to start I think is "Objects First With Java".
Learn concepts of objects first and then add the language. Not learn the
language and then add objects to it.