Matty Sarro schreef:
Greetings all! I am still relatively new to any kind of web design or php programming, I'll be completely honest. I am used to working with C, Perl, Java, and a splash of C++. PHP and web application development are kind of a new bag for me and I'm still trying to get my bearings. I see that designing a web application can involve all of the following: html, javascript, php, sql, ajax, xml, design patterns, and other things. Its kind of... information overload right now? For what I want to do I know I'm going to need to learn all of them, but coming up with a roadmap for "what should I learn first?" is becoming problematic. I want to start working on projects but I'm just not sure what order to learn things in. I don't want to come up with something that works, and then have to re-write it all over again simply because I read a new chapter in a new book. I would just like some advice on what order to go about this stuff. Thanks!
HTML, xHTML, XML - the basics of this are simple enough - the intricasies will show their ugly head as time goes by. outputting something that a browser will grok is a piece of cake, in time you'll get the hang of generating output that's 100% valid :-) javascript - learn as you go, start with cut and paste solutions and work up from there as required, plenty of people never bother with javascript at all for accessibility reasons. basically anything you want to make dynamic (singing and dancing) on the clientside (i.e. in the browser) will require javascript (okay so there is Java and Flash also buts that's beside the point) AJAX (or AJAS ;-) in our neck of the woods) is basically the use of javascript to run HTTP requests 'in the background' of a page, i.e. grabbing/sending some data from the server without refreshing the page (and then presumably manipulating the existing page based on the results of said background request ... AJAX can get fairly advanced and I think you'll know when you actually need it. Design Patterns (there is another current thread about this) - basically it comes down to applying known concepts/paradigms/strategies to solve a problem ... patterns apply to all walk of programming life ... my guess is you've 'used' them plenty in other languages even though you may not have recognized them as such ... writing clear and maintainable code is probably the best pattern to apply to development ;-) PHP, the king of web-development languages, *this is the place to start* if your interested in server-side coding (you could specialize in client-side stuff only - there are plenty that do). SQL, very shortly after your first php script is up and running you'll be wanting to store stuff in a database - SQL is the means to manipulate the data ... learning SQL, especially the mySQL variant, will come naturally when you dive into php because the practical ties between the 2 are so strong ... what's a dynamic website with out persistent, changeable data? rewrite stuff? yes you will, garanteed, many times over. this doesn't ever stop :-) apart from the odd occasion when you throw something away and forget it ;-) you could consider using perl instead of php ... perl's write-only nature would admonish you from any rewriting responsibilities :-P so basically? start writing some crufty php ... find yourself diving into HTML and SQL before you know it and then rewrite the cruft as and when new understanding presents itself :-) it's the road most of us walked (except for Tedd, he programmed the Rocks[tm] used to build the road)
-Matthew
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