I want to learn web development

[Cristiano]

Thankfully I am feeling no pressure to learn it, I just like to stay current within reason. Like you, I see no use case where it is the superior choice.

 

[Kara Spengler]

my programming languages prof in graduate school: are you people just trying to learn as many languages as possible to pad your resumes?

entire class: err, yes?

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Actually I took an 'intro to R' course this weekend to find out what it was. Not sure if it has a way to use it from the web but there seemed to be a lot of people I met that wanted to get into both data and web.

Think about R as some kind of low level SPSS; its got the functions, but without the spreadsheet functionality, which you can get with third party tools, like R studio.

So if you are into stuff like chi squared tests, cluster analysis and such, R could be probably your tool of choice.

@Soen: if you want to know what Python is able to do computing wise, you should take a look at SageMath.

 

[Kara Spengler]

Think about R as some kind of low level SPSS; its got the functions, but without the spreadsheet functionality, which you can get with third party tools, like R studio.

So if you are into stuff like chi squared tests, cluster analysis and such, R could be probably your tool of choice.

@Soen: if you want to know what Python is able to do computing wise, you should take a look at SageMath.

Now what is SPSS? Ok, I know it is some statistical package but my knowledge of it is when someone wants a data file converted to that format.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

SPSS is the standard software for statistical analysis in science since decades (its around since 1968), so most of the time you will find it only in the academic area, or where statistical evaluations are in place, like public survey institutes, quality assurance departments of big companies and such.

Since it's the standard and has a small user base, its also really expensive; if you think Creative Cloud is expensive, haha, think again, it starts by whopping 99US$/per user&month.

You can think about it of Excel on steroids, though this does it not really justice.

R is around since 1992, and can do most of the things SPSS can, do. But it comes without a GUI, which you've got to get from somewhere else.

 

[Grandma Bates]

With respect to statistics, it is a bit more nuanced. In social sciences SPSS is the standard. In commercial medical fields SAS is the standard. R is heavily used in engineering and the other sciences. Where I am we are heavy users of R and make use of knitR for reproducible research documents. We also use R for prototyping and development and then port things over to python or C++ depending on the speed requirements. This is not an uncommon combination.

With respect to web development, it is becoming more common to use R Shiny to develop front ends for in-house science/tech/data applications. If you want to work in science you should be able to say something about R Shiny with respect to web applications.

For web development we have taken up Angular for the client and python on the server. I personally really like Angular. (Angular 2 not Angular JS.) When I first saw it, it felt like an elegant and natural way to approach an application. Now when I look back, our old jquery codes feel clunky and awkward. I would hate to have to go back to that. I am not familiar with React, but frameworks make things much easier for development. For example, using Django with Angular is common for us now.

Since I am giving out free, unsolicited advice... It is just as important to have a good understanding of development environments. I agree with Free 's comments on Atom and Visual Studio. Also, git has become indispensable, at least for us, and knowing a modern versioning system is vital.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Yes, the DCVS of choice for many is git; for some smaller group it is mercurial. But many tend to forget that you don't need Github to actually use git; there are enough stacks you can use to host a git repository yourself. Also since Github has been bought now by Microsoft, some might consider that as a showstopper.

 

[danielravennest]

Pepsi has never made anything less sucky.

Straws?

 

[Free]

Straws?

You drink soda with a straw?

 

[Soen Eber]

Yeah, Git or some modern source control, along with SSH, basic command line skills (Windows & Linux), HTTPS, FTP, character encodings, and basic algorithms like trees, sorts and hashes are all in there along with shoes & socks and a pair of pants, just part of the uniform which is why I never even mentioned them. If you don't have most of those then why are you even programming (professionally)?

Straws rock. Why hasn't the word been hijacked yet for some kind of development or dev ops'ish-componentized pipeline infrastructure open architecture?

 

[Free]

Y
Straws rock. Why hasn't the word been hijacked yet for some kind of development or dev ops'ish-componentized pipeline infrastructure open architecture?

Straw - Straw - Realtime processing framework for NodeJS

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

With respect to statistics, it is a bit more nuanced. In social sciences SPSS is the standard. In commercial medical fields SAS is the standard. R is heavily used in engineering and the other sciences. Where I am we are heavy users of R and make use of knitR for reproducible research documents. We also use R for prototyping and development and then port things over to python or C++ depending on the speed requirements. This is not an uncommon combination.

Thank you very much for your insight, indeed I had mostly some views into Geography so far, where SPSS was part of the standard lectures anyway. Maybe therefore my view was a little biased.

 

[Noodles]

On a slightly different bit of advice.

A lot of coding is more about having the mindset to break down a problem and find the solution. There are often multiple solutions, especially in coding.

Do not be afraid to Google the syntax of what you want to do and just use the code you find. Most "code problems" have already been solved. There is nothing wrong with just finding the solution.

I mentioned last post about crash course learning Cold Fusion. It wasn't that hard because I already had experience with PHP. It's the same solutions for the most part except the code is different, it's a CFIF tag instead of an IF inside a PHP tag, that sort of thing.

Also for web stuff W3 Schools is great.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Well in order to cater and train that specific mindset, there are some real good channels on Youtube, like "The coding train" from Daniel Shiffmann. He covers more fun/light stuff, but also fundamentals like neural networks in his videos.

Trailer:

One typical session:

 

[Free]

Also for web stuff W3 Schools is great.

 

[Kara Spengler]

SPSS is the standard software for statistical analysis in science since decades (its around since 1968), so most of the time you will find it only in the academic area, or where statistical evaluations are in place, like public survey institutes, quality assurance departments of big companies and such.

Since it's the standard and has a small user base, its also really expensive; if you think Creative Cloud is expensive, haha, think again, it starts by whopping 99US$/per user&month.

You can think about it of Excel on steroids, though this does it not really justice.

R is around since 1992, and can do most of the things SPSS can, do. But it comes without a GUI, which you've got to get from somewhere else.

Yes, I know what SPSS is. I work in the IT department at an academic place. Generally a lot of people staying on the cutting edge use R but anyone in their subfield for a few decades will stay on SPSS or SASS because that is what they are used to.

 

[Kara Spengler]

On a slightly different bit of advice.

A lot of coding is more about having the mindset to break down a problem and find the solution. There are often multiple solutions, especially in coding.

Do not be afraid to Google the syntax of what you want to do and just use the code you find. Most "code problems" have already been solved. There is nothing wrong with just finding the solution.

I mentioned last post about crash course learning Cold Fusion. It wasn't that hard because I already had experience with PHP. It's the same solutions for the most part except the code is different, it's a CFIF tag instead of an IF inside a PHP tag, that sort of thing.

Also for web stuff W3 Schools is great.

Exactly, people ooo and ahh that tech people can solve things. No, most of the time we just google the error message. If not a complete solution it at least gets us headed in the right direction.

As to CF like PHP, yeah. Sometimes I have guessed the tag/function and was right.

A few times in the past I wrote code that refused to compile. It turned out I was completely self-consistent but just had mixed syntaxes from different languages (is xyz language stricmp() strcasecmp() or what).

A lot of languages are pretty close. It may seem strange but if you learn some C variant you will be most of the way there to pretty much every modern language.

 

[Cristiano]

Google search skills are incredibly important to a developer.Unfortunately for me, I always seem to find some obscure problem that one other person posted about in 2012 and never got an answer to.

 

[Kara Spengler]

Google search skills are incredibly important to a developer.Unfortunately for me, I always seem to find some obscure problem that one other person posted about in 2012 and never got an answer to.

My faves are the ones where it does something rarely and never when someone is around who can do the obvious thing like record an error message or something concrete. Like the vague "this program slowed down last week, what caused that".

 

[Noodles]

Google search skills are incredibly important to a developer.Unfortunately for me, I always seem to find some obscure problem that one other person posted about in 2012 and never got an answer to.

"I found a solution thanks"

Thread closed.