Tips to get started with webdevelopment

I am very cur开发者_开发百科ious about what you think is the best approach for people that want to start webdevelopment. I'm now talking about people that finished their education and so want to start from scratch. I still have questions like:

Where do you start? What software gets involved in webdevelopment? What tools / setup would you recommend?

Offcourse i'm interested to hear alot more then only the answers to those three questions. I am not writing this to get a load of people react on my post, i am trully interested in knowing how much work and money it will cost a webdeveloper when starting from scratch. I hope to get a clear view on how to approach and to maybe hear some best practices.

Well one thing's for sure, education isn't finished! There's a whole lot to learn, and the more we learn the more we seem to need to learn.

If you're really starting from having no programming background whatsoever then I think you'd be advised to take a staged approach. For example:

1). A web page with a few different text formats and pictures and colours. Here you're just learning HTML. For that any browser and a notepad editor would do, but probably a tool such as Eclipse that gives some HTML editing capability would help.

2). More adaptive HTML - stylesheets that let you change appearance without changing all the html. So that's CSS.

3). Using the above, improve your designs. There are loads of formatting tricks good web sites use and you'll need to learn those.

Note that by now we've done a lot of study and we have not actually written any programs!

4). Dynamic web pages. Now we move to the programming side, rather than just writing some HTML files write a program that delivers the HTML and in some way changes the content. Starting with something really simple such as including "today's date is ..." on the page. For that You would need to pick a server development technology such as Ruby/Rails or PHP or Java/JSP ... You'll get a lot of different advise about "best" for this.

5). Now you can start to work on accepting input from the user and doing something with it so that useful work gets done. Things such as databases start to become important.

There's a whole load more after that, JavaScript and so on. An experienced programmer can pick up this kind of stuff quite quickly, if you've never done any programming at all then you will need to be prepared to take a while before you can get to the level you probably target. I think the key is to acknowledge that a great commercial web site reflects a lot of collective wisdom and skill picked up over many years, and probably is the result of a multi-disciplinary team working together. For one person to match that is a big ask. For one person to produce something nice and useful is more practical, but still does need a lot of different skills. It's quite reasonable to specilaise in a subset of the skills. For example, good visual designers write little or no code but are highly valuable.

you need:

1. a browser, eg. FireFox, Internet Explorer. A webdeveloper toolbar might also be useful.
2. a webserver, eg. Apache, Tomcat, IIS
3. a programming environment, eg. Php or ASP.NET
4. a development tool, eg. Notepad, Notepad++, Visual Studio .NET, Eclipse
5. most of the times a database, eg. SQL Server, mySQL

I'd say it depends what you want them to master: the technologies only (up to which skill level ?) or the whole software engineering behind a web project

A sample and fast technologies learning tree could be:
1) HTML
2) CSS
3) HTTP
4) Server side programming (PHP ?): programming concepts, interacting with HTML/CSS, then PHP API
5) Databases (start simply with MySQL for instance) + SQL (CRUD with Joins, Subselect, Indexes, Views and Transactions)
6) Client side programming (JavaScript first then Ajax)
7) A web framework (ZEND ? cake ?) and a good IDE (lots of...)

Full-time learning those technologies requires at least 1.5 year , based on the experience I have with my students and people must be trained mainly on concrete projects.

Then people should learn software engineering (cf link text) covering at least - software requirements - software design - software construction - software testing

I think people can have useful experience in this software engineering tree in 1 year and can (should) combine learning technologies with learning software engineering.

For training someone from scratch (technologies + software engineering) I'd say a least 2 years if working on at least three 6-month projects

This answer is Microsoft specific.

For starters you'll need an editor, a (optional) database and a few starting points.

Microsoft supplies most of these for free: you can download the Visual Studio Webdeveloper 2008 Express Edition for free, this includes most of the stuff you'll need.

If you plan on developing database driven websites, and who isn't, you might want to use the free SQL Server 2008 Express Edition

When you have the tools setup it's time to download some samples and see see how they work. Again Microsoft supplies some for free. You can check out tutorials and samples at their Asp.Net site.

When you are ready for some more advanced stuff, check out ASP.NET MVC, again at Microsoft.

With these tools and examples you should be able to get started.

I just want to add that you will most likely also need Photoshop or other tool to create the graphics for your web sites.

In spite of java/.net/php,the HTML,CSS,JavaScript are the basic web development toolkit.

Get a job as a junior developer that will put you on a project that is developing a web application. I personally think it should involve one of the two most established platforms, Java or .Net. I know some will disagree, but these are good foundations to branch into other tech platforms later.

Make sure you open an IDE (e.g. Visual Studio or Eclipse) everyday and code something. If not, find a new job immediately.

Read religiously at night. Start with "Code Complete", then move on to other books.

Learn the fundamental technologies of the World Wide Web:

• HTTP
• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript
• DNS, URL's

Good luck and happy travels!!

you need:

a google chrome . This provide you some advantage like inspect option. A webdeveloper toolbar might also be useful. 2. Html, Css, JavaScript are the basic language that you should be know a programming environment, eg. Php or ASP.NET is needed for storing data and making login type page a Visual Code Studio is needed for coding. This provide you emmet facilities that suggest you while you are coding