Hi Folks,
I was hoping people here could give me some feedback and guide me as I learning and trying to get back into web application development. I did computer science in college and was pretty handy at coding but when I left college the only jobs I could get were application support so naturally my coding skills got very rusty. I made the mistake of moving jobs about a year back to a job where I would be doing application development & support but unfortunately that company was hard hit and it let go 25% of its staff recently via a Last In First Out order. So now Im unemployed and jobs are very scarce on the ground, if Im lucky I will pickup a job at McDonalds or something to keep the wolf from the door. Anyway enough of that, I have decided to use this time to reskill myself for some basic web application development but web technology has moved so fast since I was last doing development that Im a little bit lost. For this reason I would ask peoples advice on what technologies/frameworks I should be learning so Im not learning a dying or dead technology.
From my limited understanding there are three area’s that I need to get up to speed on that is
-
Client Side: CSS & DHTML for UI
Javascript and some library like Dojo/Scriptaliscious for fancy UI and AJAX interaction -
Server Side: The last time I did application development Java Beans were just starting to be in-Vogue. While learning to develop web applications with Java server-side code might be useful if I end up doing develoment in a corporate environment my experience is that it requires alot of code to do what other languages can do relatively easily with less code and the setup of a server environment is pretty complex
-
GloopyGlue: I have never developed a web application that uses XML or web services for data transmission so this whole area is new to me but it seems to have integrated itself into almost every aspect of web development and understandably so. What should I be learning about with regard to this kind of stuff, JSON etc?
Any and all feedback and advice would be welcome. I think I am going to start with Sitepoints CSS Live course as if nothing else I can muck around with pages look and feel.
Dave