Want to learn web development, best language & books to learn from?

[bytejunkie]

for those who are insistent on using w3schools, also do a google for w3fools, as it'll clue you in on why many many experienced web guys refuse to recommend w3schools.

honestly, you come on hexus, start a thread asking for help, then when recommended not to follow w3schools, you think you know better and go with it anyway.

codeacademy is a good shout, code club, codedojo etc.

the w3c's code reference is all you need once you've worked out how it all hangs together.
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/cover.html#minitoc

[TheAnimus]

honestly, you come on hexus, start a thread asking for help, then when recommended not to follow w3schools, you think you know better and go with it anyway.

In fairness to the guy, someone did recommend it.

When you are a lay person, its quite hard to tell someone who has good advice, from someone who is a PHP user.

IIRC I had to catch a series of long flights back the day I wrote that reply, so missed the point to rip on that guy. Wow, PHP lets you connect to your database with only 10 lines of code. It is as if they haven't used any other platform. Ever.

PHP was fine for it's very original uses, tiny, simple throw away things you wanted to nock up quickly. However as the web became more complex, it quickly became useless. IMSHO by about 2002 it was completely pointless and best left to die.

Sadly, it hasn't, just like STDs it is bizarrely common, with one common theme, most of its advocates don't know any better.

Anyway, there is a nice rant by some people who have used more recent versions than I here:
http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09...of-bad-design/

[scaryjim]

Agree with most of what you wrote - the only thing I would change or suggest is that, with a good ORM in place, or using a document database that allows the storing of objects directly (e.g MongoDB) it isn't necessary to know SQL anymore. The only reason I say this is if I were learning from scratch today, I'd wish I had started straight with abstracting my data layer completely and utilising a NoSQL database that negates the configuration and tuning otherwise required for an RDBMS. It's not as if you need the overhead of what a database provides in many use cases nowadays - and there are real alternatives

Oooooh, only just come back to this thread and hadn't picked this up - and it's interesting 'cause I was just considering this this morning.

The question is: why wouldn't you do data management in a tool that's specifically designed for it?

All these "persistence" frameworks (and that's what they are, incidentally, nothing to do with actual data management) are just a way of going "wah wah, I only want to write in one language". For some *very simple* use cases having a framework just dump objects into a data store will work, but that gives you no integrity checking, no direct linkage, no way to optimise queries - it's basically lazy programming. For anything other than the most trivial tasks you should understand why you're storing data, what it means, how it links together, and how best to manage it. And if you do that just by going "oh, I can use Entity Framework to dump the data somewhere" you'll never learn how to handle data in less trivial situations.

Frankly, thanks to MS's helpful wysiwyg tools, you *can* write an entire web application with persistence and user interaction without even seeing a line of code. But you won't understand what's going on. If you want to *learn* stuff, doing it the long way round first means you can understand when to use the shortcuts in the future.

[TheAnimus]

There is a level of knowledge required of what is underneath, and there is the limit to how far underneath one need understand.

In the case of a standard SQL server, do people need to understand a clustered index? Depends, if they have only a few thousand entries and a randomish pattern of writes, no, no they do not. Let the magic black box handle it.

This is why with things like Entity Framework and such I think you have a different style of team structure. You kind of need one person who is really quite expert, but not many of them as you did before. However that expert has to understand far more than they did before. How easy is it to have a modified closure bug, hidden inside some LINQ for instance. The errors you can get from some seemingly innocuous code on an ORM can be brutally hard to understand.

I think for me, it is why it is more useful to have someone who is well educated, not trained. Too many universities think database theory should be taught in access or MySQL :'(

Far too many developers wouldn't know their Abstract Syntax Tree from their Hash Set.

[teletext]

CSS and Javascript are great to learn, as well as HTML. Learning how to use Ajax and PHP would be great as well. I'd also advise avoiding w3schools, check out w3fools to find out why

[spiritdreams]

I have a Comp Sci Degree, and been working as software engineer for 7 years.

Best way of learning is by doing, that's my experience, attempt a basic project/game etc, while doing research online is much more practical and fun than learning from a book, speed of change in dev environment is really fast, there is really no point in attempting to memorize syntax, the frame of mind for a programmer is much more important.