Web Development

What is Web Development?

Web development is in simple terms, creating websites. Creating tutorials for web development can be tricky because there isn’t one language to do it. Just creating a decent looking website you need to use HTML and CSS. To do something fancy like changing text on a website, you need to use JavaScript. To be able to store data for later usage on the server you need to use a server side language like ASP.net or PHP along with an SQL language like MySQL or PostgreSQL. Thankfully languages like JavaScript, PHP, and ASP.net are similar and follow the fundamentals that most languages do. CSS and HTML are not traditional languages though and are setup completely different. SQL based languages have the same basic structure to one another, so figuring out the syntax of one can help you with others.

Once you learn the basics of these five languages then you can start to get into frameworks like jQuery and content management systems like WordPress. You shouldn’t worry about these too much until you have at least a basic knowledge of the others.

Tools of the Trade

There’s no shortage of options to get you started in web development. Things like Adobe Dreamweaver and Microsoft’s Visual Studio can be good for beginners as they help with closing tags and lining up brackets, but they can become a crutch. That’s why I recommend starting with Notepad++ or just Notepad. With JavaScript, CSS, and HTML you can run the webpages in your browser once they are written.

When it comes to server side code, you will need to get a server remotely or setup one locally. To do one locally you will need a minimum of Apache, PHP, and MySQL. If you’re getting one remotely it will typically be setup on a Linux operating system. This is called a LAMP server (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python). If you set it up on Windows it’s known as a WAMP server (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python). You probably don’t want to open your PC to the web and allow outside traffic to access your PC, so it’s best to stick with renting hosting space.

Getting Started

Once you have everything you need, you can start creating websites. My recommendation is to start with HTML and CSS together. Understand their relationship and how they work together. Learn some of the basic tags and basic stylings for them. Once you have a firm grasping of it, move on to JavaScript. You won’t need any additional programs to start, once you move into server side coding is when you will need the WAMP or LAMP setup mentioned above. If you’re learning PHP, learn MySQL at the same time as they are closely related.