Learning by Doing

Whoops, badly worded bit.

How rewarding have you found web development as a hobby or a career?
 >> Stay informed about: Learning by Doing 

On 14 Feb 2007 10:38:42 GMT, TheVeech <theveech DeleteThis @gmail.com> wrote:

>I signed up for a service because I was interested in learning more about
>web development. I prefer jumping in at the deep end and learning by doing
>than reading up too much at the expense of actually getting stuck in, or
>going on a course.
>
>But there's so many aspects to web development that I didn't realise at
>the time I signed up. So, if I was starting again, what approach would be
>good for a masochistic self-educator to learn the most? E.g. go
>'dedicated', learn a programming language, etc., etc. In other words,
>what bases do you need to cover, how is this best achieved, and how
>rewarding is web development as a hobby?

Yes you sound like you have your head screwed on.

My advice.

Obtain a Linux distribution, preferably Red Hat, and install it on a
PC, best if its on its own PC (doesn't need to be high spec, any old
PC will do), then network that PC to your everyday machine.

Now you hwve your own in house "web server", just like one you can
rent (close enough for this exercise).

On your own web server you can build web sites, test them, break them,
reinstall and learn without fear or worry!

I suggest Red Hat linux as so many hosts use it, it comes with Apache
(which so many hosts use) and all the other bits you need.

Buzz words for you to investigate might include:

Linux
Apache
HTML
CSS
Perl
Php
CGI
SSI

Regards


Matt
 >> Stay informed about: Learning by Doing 

On 14 Feb 2007 10:43:12 GMT, TheVeech <theveech.DeleteThis@gmail.com> wrote:

>Whoops, badly worded bit.
>
>How rewarding have you found web development as a hobby or a career?

I forgot to answer this question!

For me it is simply a tool enabling me to publish a particular work
(and a few free sites for family and organisations).

As a career, the local builders make more than I do from my online
publishing, but it serves its purpose.

Matt
 >> Stay informed about: Learning by Doing 

TheVeech wrote:

> But there's so many aspects to web development that I didn't realise at
> the time I signed up.

You don't mention what background you come from. Depending on what
experience you have in related fields (programming, publishing, visual
design, information management, type-setting, writing, sales, etc) you
will probably want to approach learning web development from a different
angle.

My generic advice, without knowing this background info, would be to start
by learning plain old HTML 4.01 Strict. A good working knowledge of HTML
is fairly essential no matter what you decide to do next.

Take a document that you have in real life, say, a chapter of a book, or
the instructions to your washing machine and learn to mark it up
semantically by hand, using heading elements, paragraphs, lists, tables,
<strong>, <em>, <samp> and so forth. Get it to validate on the W3C
validator.

Get some free/cheap hosting and learn to use FTP, SCP and/or Rsync to copy
files from your computer to the server and back.

Now learn some basic CSS, typography and colour theory all at once, by
adding a stylesheet to your document and playing just with the following
CSS properties:

color
background-color
font-family
font-size
font-weight
font-style
font-variant
text-transform
text-decoration
padding
margin
border
list-style

Experiment a lot, learning what combinations of colours and fonts work
well together; what is easily readable, and what is not.

Using just those this knowledge, you should be able to create some small
but aesthetically pleasing web sites of several linked documents sharing a
common style sheet. Make a few such sites until you're comfortable with th
process.

It's likely that the next thing you'll want to discover is how to share
common design elements (e.g. navigation bars) between several pages. When
you get to that stage, you'll want to foray into server-side scripting
languages, but I'll leave that discussion to another day.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact
Geek of ~ HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python*/Apache/Linux

* = I'm getting there!
 >> Stay informed about: Learning by Doing 

On Wed, 14 Feb 2007 11:47:08 +0000, Matt Probert wrote:

> On 14 Feb 2007 10:43:12 GMT, TheVeech <theveech DeleteThis @gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>Whoops, badly worded bit.
>>
>>How rewarding have you found web development as a hobby or a career?
>
> I forgot to answer this question!
>
> For me it is simply a tool enabling me to publish a particular work (and
> a few free sites for family and organisations).
>
> As a career, the local builders make more than I do from my online
> publishing, but it serves its purpose.
>
> Matt

I mentioned careers to get input from as many people as possible -
hobbyists and professionals - in other words, a career in web development
for me is totally unrealistic. Web dev just compliments other hobbies -
mainly learning about different aspects of computing and because I enjoy
the creative side of web development. My background, then, is pretty much
as a hobbyist.

I do run Linux, and used Red Hat years ago. Fedora should be okay for
what you've advised, though, shouldn't it? On HTML, I became familiar with
it in the 90s, mainly examining other people's code and experimenting, but
didn't keep up with things and lost touch. The question was mainly
intended to find out from those in the know how people like me can catch
up with what we've missed out on, fill in some gaps and bring our
knowledge up to date.

I did buy some cheap web hosting recently and I've been using Drupal on an
experimental site, but, apart from setting things up, I've got bored
because I don't find that I'm learning much at all, so I'll definitely
follow the advice from you, Toby and Andy (even though I still want to
learn more about Drupal, too). My main system's been gathering dust for a
few months, so I'm also looking forward to following up on your
suggestion re: a server.

All told, you, Toby and Andy have pretty much decided my next few months
for me! Cheers. If I need any aspirin, I know who to ask
 >> Stay informed about: Learning by Doing