Hello all first time poster here, I did a search and didn’t find what I was looking for and I hope my question isn’t too vague.
I know very little in regards to coding but want to learn, more as a hobby and for self fulfillment. I don’t expect to do it professionally and don’t have money to invest in commercial products so I think that puts me in the open source realm.
Based on what you all now know where would you start? I’ve done some research and think starting on the front end is probably best. So I was thinking about learning HTML, CSS first and then probably moving on to JavaScript and then start thinking about something server side (maybe Ruby not sure). I hear a mix of things regarding PHP, that worries me a bit but I’m not an expert so it’s hard to tell if that is rumor or based in fact.
Firstly, the good thing is you don’t need some expensive piece of software to produce websites anyway, a free program like Notepad++ can do the task well (all you really need is a solid text editor with a few useful flourishes like syntax highlighting). Secondly, you’ll want to learn HTML, CSS and JavaScript to get things going (that’ll cover pretty much everything you could want visually) and from there you only need to learn more complex languages like PHP is you want to do things like save to databases or process stuff at the server-side. For the average static website, HTML (easy), CSS (easy) and JavaScript (medium) are the three core elements you’ll want to get to grips with. As for producing websites like those: when you learn the languages mentioned, you should be able to view the source code and understand what it all means (thereby be able to know how to re-create similar effects with the right combination of code).
Starting with HTML and CSS is probably a good idea, but in terms of motivation you should probably come up with some pet project for which you want to learn all that First think about what you want to provide, then think about how to achieve that using HTML, then how to make it look pretty using CSS and so on
Your situation likely same with me, learning web html/css " more as a hobby and for self fulfillment", and i start like to involve in coding in may 2010, then took a short course in web design fundamental, only the basic type, then moving on reading google every night learning html,and css, tho i make my own personal studying frame
Html–>css—>javascripts/jquery---->php—>ajax,
at first i design web using tables…then i found a blog telling that using css much better with fast loading pages, so i move to css instead using of tables, well i guess you have to be self motivated and keep discovering something new.
oh on daily basis i work as Tax controller and an accountant…so it takes time for me to learn during the night hehehe
Seems logical, if CSS/HTML is what you’re interested in.
I “started” on a VIC-20 in the 80’s, because thats what was available to me. (and all I had was the manual, didn’t realize you could actually buy software…)
Later moving into various basics, assembler and so-on, I found the relational data model to be highly fascinating (this was before SQL… think, writing fixed records to files and learning about the challenges with that)
Poked around in CP/M, DOS, OS/2 and then the blockbuster of them all… UNIX. (I love unix).
Had I not poked around in these things, I wouldn’t have known they were interesting to me, even though CP/M is essentially useless and I haven’t touched assembler in decades, the stuff I learned from poking around in it has sort of stuck with me.
You’re not going to know what is and isn’t interesting to you unless you play around a bit, you might find that doing java apps for telephones is fun, or, you might really get a kick out of connecting a serial port to TTL chips on a breadboard. (TTL was fun, but hard to justify the $$ and space for the electronics)
For me, knowing what I know now, and given the available resources at the time, I probably would have skipped DOS and OS/2 and just gotten a shell account on some unix host… of course… I had no idea at the time because I hadn’t yet tried them.
