Finishing up HTML course, what should I learn next?

[h0kie99]

I was about to sign up for an Intro to CSS course, but when I read the description I learned that not all browsers are CSS-enabled...!! I was surprised. So, does this mean it's not a good idea to include CSS as one of my fundamental courses for learning web development?

What other courses should I take? A lot of sites I'll be working on in the future are written in ASP (and I will need to edit them). So, I should take a course in that... What about PHP? MySQL? Javascript? Photoshop courses?

Thanks!!

**Edited after reading aus_dave's response**
What do I plan on doing after this? GOOD QUESTION! I plan on working for a friend of mine who has his own internet consulting business. He does the sales part, and then gives me all the business info I need to juice up a client's site. I will then have to log in to the client's site and edit it. These are all small businesses, so nothing TOO fancy, but my friend says that it is important to learn about dynamic pages, because a lot of the sites he works on are written in ASP. This is where I am worried because I do have a Mac, so that could hold me back?!? Anyway, this is what I plan on doing... so I need to have a good mix of design, programming, and the web business in general. I almost need to have a little knowledge of everything, instead of learning one programming language hard core. I won't be creating sites from scratch... at least not in the next year or so!

I hope that helps!

 

[aus_dave]

You haven't said what you plan to do when you finish your course. IT is a big area and I'm sure there are plenty of web programmers, database gurus etc. around that would have no idea about CSS (or HTML for that matter ).

That being said I think an introduction to CSS would be worth doing. It is one area that new browsers are making sure they comply with (IE 7 on Windows may too, who knows). As the older browsers get superseded CSS will take on even more importance.

If you plan on doing much web design I'd take the intro course and then CSS II, III and IV .

 

[h0kie99]

aus_dave...

I added some info up there in my post. Thanks!

 

[SilentPanda]

Arguably some web browsers aren't even graphics enabled... however I think you'll find that most people have CSS enabled browsers. I would anticipate a lot of sites on the web use CSS right now as it is. Plus you can (I suppose) make multiple versions of the site (one for CSS enabled and one for non). That's a pain but... I think it's part of the web monkey territory.

 

[aus_dave]

...because I do have a Mac, so that could hold me back?!?

That's an inadvertent rhyme or was it deliberate .

I'd say quite the opposite, my two favourite Mac quotes:

"Once you go Mac, you don't go back"

and this one which a printer told me:

"If you don't know Mac, you don't know jack"

Sorry to take your thread off-track. ASP is tricky I guess, but Macs are excellent for other languages such as PHP and Perl especially as it is so easy to set up your machine as a development server.

 

[wordmunger]

You need CSS and PHP. Everyone has CSS, unless they're still running a Mac Classic with System 7. PHP is a must for interactive sites.

 

[zim]

All modern browsers support css. Not all modern browsers support the latest variation of css, version 2.1.

There are plenty of big named organizations who's websites are entirely encoded with xhtml and css.

If you have a general understanding of the web and web technologies then pick up a copy of Jeffrey Zeldman's designing with web standards. He does a great job at explaining web standards. Also check out Eric Meyer and his book eric meyer on css.

As for asp... YUCK! sorry, I personally have a strong dislike for asp, I know that a lot of small businesses use it as a means for control. php all the way!

 

[angelneo]

Well, HTML and CSS is the basics so you should definitely learn them. As for dynamic content, you should pick one of the different languages (in your case seems that it is inevitable to choose ASP) focus on learning that particular one to the point that you can code comfortably with it. After then, you can pick up on the rest.

The main reason why many people chooses PHP is that its free and you can put it in unix, linux, windows or Mac almost anything plus its supposedly to be more efficient than the rest. The most famous combination being LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) offered by almost every hosting company.

JSP does have its perks and again, it should be available on all OS except that you need to run its own server application such as Tomcat (free) although JSP server applications has their enterprise version such as cloudscape, weblogic so on which is only affordable by big companies. However, it is quite expensive to look for a hosting company that supports JSP

ASP can only run in windows and in their IIS. I believe that there is some effort to port it to other platforms but I'm not too sure about it. A better ASP would be using .NET which might be valuable to you in the future.

These are all I can think about. Do correct me if I am wrong cause I am learning as well.

Personally I have no preferences be it ASP, JSP or PHP.

 

[davecuse]

I would definitely take the CSS course, it sounds like the majority of what you will be doing is basically "skinning" existing sites. Learn how to make them look good now, then focus on PHP and making things work well behind the scenes later.

 

[Rower_CPU]

I concur with pretty much every recommendation made thus far.

Learn CSS and properly structured HTML.
Learn PHP and MySQL.

 

[kgarner]

Definetly learn CSS. Once the site is encoded with CSS it is so much easier to go in and redesign or tweak it. You only need to edit one file, not every page on the site.

And definitely learn PHP. Even if you don't do truly dynamic sites PHP is great. I used it on a site for my grandpa's cabin rental (http://peacefulpriestlake.com). None of it is dynamic (in the true sense of the word), but I used PHP includes and other techniques so that when I need to change something across the whole site (eg add a new section to the menu, change header, etc), I am editing just one file, not every file.

 

[James L]

CSS is a MUST, as is properly coded, and VALIDATED, html/xhtml.

The concept of CSS is to remove all formatting tags from your html, separating markup from presentation. This means no <font> tags, no <center> tags, etc. This way, you can have 1 external stylesheet dictate the formatting for the ENTIRE site. If a client says "the site looks great, but could you make all of the paragraph headers a little bit bigger, and bold?", all you have to do is go in and change 1 line in your stylesheet, and all 242 paragraph headers in your site change also. Pretty cool. Decide you want to double space the paragraphs? Again, just change one line in your stylesheet and they all change... site wide.

I am sure they made you validate your html code in your course, but if not get very comfortable with placing the proper DOCTYPE at the beginning of each html/xhtml page, and then going to www.w3.org and validating the page. Keeping all your pages error free keeps the browser(s) from going into quirks mode and rendering your page(s) incorrectly. www.w3.org also has a CSS validator for the same reason.

Next up, I would go with PHP. My reasoning on it is that if you have OSX, you already have an Apache server and PHP installed on your system! Also, as mentioned above, virtually every server/host has it installed.

Become extremely comfortable working with Photoshop.

Finally, some client side scripting is fun every now and then, like Javascript.

Cheers!

James

 

[zim]

I am sure they made you validate your html code in your course, but if not get very comfortable with placing the proper DOCTYPE at the beginning of each html/xhtml page, and then going to www.w3.org and validating the page. Keeping all your pages error free keeps the browser(s) from going into quirks mode and rendering your page(s) incorrectly. www.w3.org also has a CSS validator for the same reason.

Sadly there are "teachers" who do not emphasize or even talk about standards or even the w3. Who knows why.. could be lack of care or even that they themselves just don't know.

 

[_iCeb0x_]

Focus on something and you'll be set

Being a web developer for quite some time, my true advice is: FOCUS!

Focus on something like the presentational part (HTML, CSS, lay-out design) or on the "logic" part (ASP, PHP, (My)SQL). Obviously, try to know a little of everything, but don't try to be the best at everything. In bigger companies, you'll have people specialized in 3 different areas: graphic design, interface design and development.

People that work with the graphics part will hand out some PSD's to the interface designer, who is going to chop all those GIF's and JPEG's and get the HTML and JavaScript done. The development people will write the dynamic parts and (in some cases) will hand them out to this very same interface designer. In other cases, some kind of templating system will be used and the interface design people will rarely see any code.

If you're going to work for a small business, take the time to experiment with everything and find out what you feel more comfortable with. When it's time for you to go higher in your career, you'll probably have a good part of what it takes.

Other considerations: be organized (use identing seriously), write simple and efficient code (avoid nested tables and such) and stick to standards. Remember: someday your code may be read/edited by a workmate or other person.

Watch what the W3C is doing and start using new standards when all major browsers support them for some time. Don't ever use browser-specific stuff, unless you can offer some alternative to the users of other browsers.

Know the audience. For example, if you're designing a web site that may be "viewed" by blind people, use the necessary markup properties.

If you can, stay away from Microsoft stuff. Go Open Source instead. It's not only PHP; there's also Perl, Python, Ruby and some others.

That's my nickelbag full of 2 cents...

 

[James L]

Great advice!

 

[h0kie99]

Wow!

Thanks for all the fabulous advice!!! I really appreciate all of the time you guys put into answering my questions... maybe one day I can help someone else out around here! aus_dave, maybe freestyling really is my calling, not web design.

I totally agree with the statement that I need to focus on something, because having worked in IT for a couple years, I agree that there aren't many people in big business who do it all. There are specialized folks for every step of the process. I think in the short term, as I start to work for this VERY small business, I need to know a little of everything... and then I'll see what I really need to learn more about and take it from there.

I can tell a lot of you hate ASP. I haven't learned anything about the code, so I don't know how I feel about it yet. But what happens when I am sitting at my Mac trying to edit a client's ASP site??