I want to learn web development

[Soen Eber]

I'm just about done with a Head's First book on HTML & CSS, and want to continue with web development, I guess with HTML 5, CSS, and JavaScript. It's been ... 15 years? Since I seriously looked at HTML. I have some ideas on a training progression but I'm not quite sure about how to do it right. Eventually I want to add these skills to my career toolkit.

My current thinking is to start with just a "101 level" mix of HTML, CSS, & JavaScript and not do a deep dive, just do the exercises from my study materials, create flashcards to study and make a small personal project or two to firm things up. After that I would try to get up and running with React or Angular and then get to an intermediate level; rinse & repeat.

Once I have a firm intermediate grasp. I was thinking it would be good to mix in jQuery and do some database and networking projects.. I guess that means I'd then be at the level where I'd need a hosting provider

Can anyone make any recommendations as to how I should approach this and what my study progression should be? Also useful training materials, project ideas, and tools, etc. I haven't been able to find a "training progression flowchart" that specs this all out for me.

I am already comfortable with Linux: vi, shell scripting, common commands, working from a command line environment, and so on.

EDIT: My first post had a lot of extra junk that wasn't really relevant or all that clear.

 

[Free]

Sounds like you already have a good plan. But don't just "learn." Create projects for yourself. Locate sites that are doing things you want to do and duplicate replicate them, come up with ideas for (small) sites and build them. When you learn to draw or paint, you maintain a sketchbook of your work as you learn. There's nothing wrong with doing the same thing for web development. And you end up with a portfolio of of functioning pages and apps that display not just what you're learned, but what you can do.

 

[Soen Eber]

I've figured why there is an HTML/CSS/JavaScript (aka HTLM 5) prereq for the .NET A.S. degree I'll be taking. the course progression for the degree actually falls right in line with the Microsoft MCSD App Developer certification path, starting from HTML 5 through ... IIRC Active Service Pages. The HTML 5 Cert component is #70-480, so I was able to grab the two books on my Safari subscription. It looks pretty damn comprehensive, but it's naturally focused on the Microsoft technology stack. On wards to Visual Studio!

With my Linux background I'd also like to figure out that tool chain as well, sticking as close as possible to what is used in the workplace (I hope it's mostly command line based). It should be easy enough to find what I need for that, though.

I did find a useful web developer road map for training, courtesy of GitHub. It's a huge, sprawling mess, but between that and the MCSD cert path it'll help me stay focused and not go down any rabbit holes.

 

[Beebo Brink]

My current thinking is to start with just a "101 level" mix of HTML, CSS, & JavaScript and not do a deep dive, just do the exercises from my study materials, create flashcards to study and make a small personal project or two to firm things up. After that I would try to get up and running with React or Angular and then get to an intermediate level; rinse & repeat.

Once I have a firm intermediate grasp. I was thinking it would be good to mix in jQuery and do some database and networking projects.. I guess that means I'd then be at the level where I'd need a hosting provider.

I'd mix in the jQuery earlier, as part of your basic HTML/CSS knowledge. Current web design relies heavily on all three, and jQuery is pretty easy to pick up since the coding has been done for you. You're just learning the syntax for calling the functions. Go from there to javascript.

 

[Noodles]

I second having a project.

I still feel like I am not any level of "web developer" but honestly i kind of am. And I still learn new things through projects. I've run my own websites for ages now, though most of them these days run on Wordpress, I still customize little things up here and there. I also manage an internal website for my job as part of a team of like 5 or 6 people, because I needed a "side project" but I do like 90% of the actual web coding, and there is a guy that does some DB stuff and pretty much all of the other people on the group are just there to give ideas and have something that looks good for their bosses. The point is, I ended up having to force myself to learn my way around Cold Fusion, and now I get to get better at handling PHP and other design elements because the company has decided Cold Fusion is EoL and going away in like a year, so we'll need to rebuild the site from scratch.

The point is, it's a project, it's a focus and a point to learn.

Some things I've done on my own, just for some other inspiration, I build a simple little blog engine once, mostly it was just a user based input form that would then display to a simple front end. I started working on a cataloging database set up that you let you add things and categories but never really finished it. I've done some interaction using PHP and remote IOT devices (and SL), which was fun, you basically have to build a page to take some inputs tot he database and call the URL remotely.

I have heard some people say PHP is too old but personally, a LOT of the web still runs on it and it would be a good direction to go to add more to your web dev kit.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

I have heard some people say PHP is too old but personally, a LOT of the web still runs on it and it would be a good direction to go to add more to your web dev kit.

My advise when talking to those people: just ignore them!

Because those people are programming like this (and here's the who article):


The only web programming language so far, which really became obsolete is Perl, ah and maybe Java. Perl powered all of the web, before PHP became a thing; PHP replaced it. PHP is way too big, and well established to go away soon, and every few years there's this next, new shiny thing/framework/language, where they say "it will replace PHP sooner or later" - and it doesn't.

For example, just take a look at the Ruby on Rails framework, which was really hyped back in the day when it was introduced. And who uses RoR by now? Only a small group, because running its updates is a proverbial PITA. Heck, some pieces of flagship software like Discourse even refuse to ship otherwise than Docker, because supporting it would otherwise nearly impossible.

For a while after this it looked like Node.js grabbed some piece of the cake, which has its own bag of problems with the npm-infrastructure, a dependency hell for the most trivial and easiest functions which is not even funny.

Some people tried Go, while others embraced as chimare Electron which is just an abonimation of epic proportions.

For me the quesion is when learning web development: what's the goal of the exercise? Being able to make functioning websites from scratch, or more the programming side?

 

[Soen Eber]

For me the quesion is when learning web development: what's the goal of the exercise? Being able to make functioning websites from scratch, or more the programming side?

tl/dr: programming side.

I used to be an Oracle back end developer but got laid off during the recession, and instead of looking for work I took a couple years off to get Oracle certifications. That worked so well I have worked data entry and clerical positions for the past four years... When there's a recession and you've taken two years off, the only people getting hired are unicorns. When the economy opened up it'd been way too long to get back into Oracle.

I will no longer work with a technology where the only way to get experience is to be gainfully employed and where the stakeholders are greedy and evil.

I recently got an inheritance that lets me go back to school, and will be pursuing a .NET developer A.S. degree. The first class in that (starting January) is HTML/CSS/JavaScript (as described earlier), and I am getting a head start on it. I'll continue to be learning it on the side after the class is over because it is so popular and there are so many fun ways to do things with it. I actually plan to create the project Noodles was working on (from scratch, so I can learn and document) since it's something I can incrementally grow, and also I want to create a YouTube app that lets a user create and share bookmarks, annotations, notes, etc as a more advanced project. These will both be "fun" projects; my .NET training will get front billing and I'll be doing the certs for it.

Which is better than my earlier plan of building a career around Reddit-driven development, Visual Basic for Applications, Perl, & Objective-C ;P

 

[Free]

Visual Basic for Applications

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Objective-C ;P

Nothing wrong with that one, if you got a good idea for an iOS app or just want to get into that field.

 

[Anya Ristow]

Add Twitter Bootstrap to your to-do list

I'd mix in the jQuery earlier, as part of your basic HTML/CSS knowledge. Current web design relies heavily on all three, and jQuery is pretty easy to pick up since the coding has been done for you. You're just learning the syntax for calling the functions. Go from there to javascript.

jQuery is an early must, but remember while you are learning it that it is not necessary in order to do document manipulations. jQuery's GUI-building has been largely supplanted by other technologies, so its most useful feature is AJAX. The document manipulation comes along for free when you are also doing AJAX, but if you're not, then jQuery may introduce unnecessary overhead. Depending on what you're doing.

...React or Angular...

By the time you get to them they may not be the hotness. And read the criticisms of them. I've had two people working for me that tried to make use of Angular and all it did was make the project take longer and introduced yet another learning curve into working on our shit. Because we don't pay a lot I have to balance "programmers want to learn shit and play with tools to be happy in their job" with "we're paying for this so it better work", and I came down too far in favor of fun. By about the fifth time I had to say, "what you're doing isn't difficult without the tool, so why are you fighting with it?", we were in too deep to pull out.

In short, if the tool actually makes the job easier, then use it. If it doesn't, you are doing resume coding, which is fine if you aren't working for someone but counterproductive if someone else is paying for your time.

And that is my criticism of modern development methodology. Until I see someone actually being more productive learning all this shit, and I never have, I think it is mostly resume coding. I think developers intentionally make their job difficult so that they feel smart, and so that they have buzzwords to put on their resume.

Now, get off my lawn.

 

[Kara Spengler]

My advise when talking to those people: just ignore them!

Because those people are programming like this (and here's the who article):


The only web programming language so far, which really became obsolete is Perl, ah and maybe Java. Perl powered all of the web, before PHP became a thing; PHP replaced it. PHP is way too big, and well established to go away soon, and every few years there's this next, new shiny thing/framework/language, where they say "it will replace PHP sooner or later" - and it doesn't.

For example, just take a look at the Ruby on Rails framework, which was really hyped back in the day when it was introduced. And who uses RoR by now? Only a small group, because running its updates is a proverbial PITA. Heck, some pieces of flagship software like Discourse even refuse to ship otherwise than Docker, because supporting it would otherwise nearly impossible.

For a while after this it looked like Node.js grabbed some piece of the cake, which has its own bag of problems with the npm-infrastructure, a dependency hell for the most trivial and easiest functions which is not even funny.

Some people tried Go, while others embraced as chimare Electron which is just an abonimation of epic proportions.

For me the quesion is when learning web development: what's the goal of the exercise? Being able to make functioning websites from scratch, or more the programming side?

For all people complain about PHP it is not going anywhere soon. Frameworks come and go but it is still php underneath. PHP runs too many things: from drupal to most of what hosting providers have set up to install. Syntax wise it is pretty close to C so just makes sense for programmers to use.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Wordpress alone powers around 32% of all websites, blogs and none alike. Wordpress is written in PHP, and so it is its ecosystem of plugins. The market share of CMS is even higher, around 60%. And before you ask :you can use Wordpress as blog engine, CMS, shop system and many other things, so this makes sense.

This fact alone underlines that PHP is not going away anytime soon. It powers forums like this here, web shops, web sites, and much, much more, the code base is way too big to fade away soon.

 

[Beebo Brink]

jQuery is an early must, but remember while you are learning it that it is not necessary in order to do document manipulations. jQuery's GUI-building has been largely supplanted by other technologies, so its most useful feature is AJAX. The document manipulation comes along for free when you are also doing AJAX, but if you're not, then jQuery may introduce unnecessary overhead. Depending on what you're doing.

Hmm. I'm not familiar with what you mean by "document manipulation" or why that has anything to do with jQuery as a web design tool. Must be some developer thang that is outside my wheelhouse.

My focus is information architecture, content strategy and user interface design We make heavy use of jQuery in every single site we build (Enterprise level). Our basic design toolkit includes Image rotators, dynamic tabs for content layout/display, accordions for content layout/display, and assorted toggles, as well as functions for collapsing all those features into mobile friendly versions.

 

[danielravennest]

My focus is information architecture, content strategy and user interface design We make heavy use of jQuery in every single site we build (Enterprise level). Our basic design toolkit includes Image rotators, dynamic tabs for content layout/display, accordions for content layout/display, and assorted toggles, as well as functions for collapsing all those features into mobile friendly versions.

I understood some of those words.

 

[Noodles]

Wordpress alone powers around 32% of all websites, blogs and none alike. Wordpress is written in PHP, and so it is its ecosystem of plugins. The market share of CMS is even higher, around 60%. And before you ask :you can use Wordpress as blog engine, CMS, shop system and many other things, so this makes sense.

This fact alone underlines that PHP is not going away anytime soon. It powers forums like this here, web shops, web sites, and much, much more, the code base is way too big to fade away soon.

I have not super looked I to it, but WordPress is about to force something called Guttenberg on it's users which I believe is Ruby based.

The buzz I have seen suggests literally no one wants this except the makers of Wordpress.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

I have not super looked I to it, but WordPress is about to force something called Guttenberg on it's users which I believe is Ruby based.

The buzz I have seen suggests literally no one wants this except the makers of Wordpress.

It's a new editor component, replacing the old one. So sorry to disappoint you, but this is definitely not written in Ruby, but most of it is in plain old PHP and some parts in Javascript.

 

[Sid]

I understood some of those words.

I think we ordinaries need a training in web-Chinese first.

 

[Beebo Brink]

I understood some of those words.

You didn't ask, but you're going to be sorry anyway.

My focus = What I do all day

is information architecture = what content do you have (documents, images, lists, words), how do you organize it, where do you put it

content strategy = what do users need on your site, what do you want to see

and user interface design = what methods do we use to make sure users can easily and intuitively find and view content

We make heavy use of jQuery in every single site we build (Enterprise level). = Large sites for companies that pay Enterprise-level fees for licensed software (such as Microsoft SharePoint or Dot Net).

Our basic design toolkit includes Image rotators, dynamic tabs for content layout/display, accordions for content layout/display, and assorted toggles, = user interactive eye candy that (ideally) also makes the site more usable for them

as well as functions for collapsing all those features into mobile friendly versions. = Looks good on your smart phone

 

[Free]

I understood some of those words.

Sadly, I understood all of them.

 

[Free]

as well as functions for collapsing all those features into mobile friendly versions. = Looks good on your smart phone

Aha, fantasy development!