Resources for getting started with web development? [closed]

Answer 1

Designing with Web Standards is a great first read!

http://www.zeldman.com/dwws/

Answer 2

I'm with Ian on this one. Reading books is all well and good, but nothing beats getting stuck in. I actually started with a Dummies Guide to ASP (that'd be "classic" ASP), back in 1999.

If I was going to start from scratch today I'd be looking at something that covered a full stack solution, whether Apache/PHP/MySQL, RoR or whatever.

ATM I have no experience of Rails, but it might be a pretty good place to start as it includes a lot of stuff that you'd have to figure out early on otherwise (integration with a Scriptaculous, a JS framework) - you can always learn what going on under the hood at a later date.

.NET is always an option, and if you're comfortable with Visual Studio it may be the way to go, but it's not the easiest thing to pick up otherwise.

If you know a bit of HTML but are basically new to server-side programming you might look at ColdFusion. It's actually extremely powerful and like Rails includes lots of "out of the box" benefits. There's a Swiss company called Railo who are currently in the process of releasing an Open Source ColdFusion engine that is affiliated with JBoss.

Last and not least - don't forget databases! Sooner or later you'll need to get to grips with some pretty serious SQL...

Answer 3

CFML (aka "ColdFusion" even though that's really an Adobe product, not the language) is definitely easy to learn, and if you want FOSS for CFML, in addition to Railo you can use Open BlueDragon which is a GPL CFML engine.

Answer 4

If you really just want to jump in with both feet, I would suggest looking at ColdFusion from Adobe. The developer edition is free and runs on windows, os x and linux. The documentation is authoritative and extensive, there is a very active developer community and only a few books you might want to dig into. The definitive guide is a series of books that can be found on Amazon

The nice thing about ColdFusion is that you can use it as a stepping stone to other languages and remain productive along the way. You can even mix it together with Java since it is itself written in java. There are also lots of goodies built in that you would have to scour the web for or pay more for in other languages. Things like full text indexing, graphing, server monitoring, ajax based controls, flash/flex integration, asynch os calls, etc.

You even have the choice of building object oriented code or procedural code, although some people would not count that as a benefit. Those people rarely agree on which style should win, though.

Cheers!