Forum Moderators: phranque
I'm wonderin' the same thing...Here's my thoughts:
Microsoft ain't goin away, but I would learn *nix first. JSP before ASP. mySQL (PostgeSQL,etc.)before SQL 7.0+
Perl is relatively simple and extremely useful...know it enough to hack a little bit.
PHP and mySQL will do a lot for you from what I can see. I can't use either of them yet and I really dont need them yet, but thats the direction I would go based on where I've been so far.
My .002
Yeah pretty much! Then you broad out from there. I still believe perl is the most useful to learn, 99.99% of the servers out there have it + you pretty much could do what ever you need to do with it.
Learn, yes. Master? No.
The old 80-20 rule comes into play, and it might be more like a 95-5 rule when it comes to web technologies.
That is, by learning the basics that you need to have in order to accomplish the most common tasks, you've got a foundation that gets you up and running in any area. Then, when a sticky task comes up, you can intelligently expand your book-learning, or ask good questions from the many helpful places on the web.
With the basics under your belt, you also know when you need to outsource, and you have enough understanding not to be flying blind when hiring a subcontractor.
Once you've got your head around one language, you can pretty much pick others up in bits and bobs - eg I'm by no means an expert in javascript, but can usually follow the logic of a code snippet, which is always useful.
My advice is to pick a language and just try and learn a single trick or command every day - you'll be up and running in no time :)
And spend a lot of time at the keyboard.
-G
I'll admit though, when I first started web authoring I never thought I'd write a page from <html> to </html>... I still use frontpage to save time, no matter how icky the code ends up some times. (I recently went through 40 pages on my site and prettied up the code... Dammit that was no fun...)
Anyways, thanks for all the opinions... At least I know I'm not the only one doing the proverbial "Chicken without a head" dance around here... ;-)
So do yourself a favour and forget it... don't even start. The key lies not in learning yet another skill but in having the time available to manage your enterprise. While you are beavering away with the mysteries of ASP or whatever, some other part of your business is being neglected.
Concentrate on learning html well, that is after all the fundamental building block of the whole system. Focus on search engine "findability" and the related SEO issues. Being an ASP fundi loses its appeal if the site is invisible.
When you need a script, applet or whatever that is probably in common use elsewhere, check out the shareware libraries. There is nearly always something out there for just a few $$. Do you need to write it yourself or do just want it to work?
If you have a unique need hire a specialist programmer. The costs can nearly always be recouped in charges to clients.
To be fair I am not working at the leading edge of web technology, but very few are, and for the majority the above approach will work satisfactorily.
Upgrade to Dreamweaver or GoLive... it will save you TONS of time 'cleaning up' garbled code.
Is there a html anonymous group out there the likes of me should join?
minnapple
