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Improving my web skils

J

Jesse B

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
May 30, 2010
Messages
1,631
I'm enrolled in a Computer Science course currently, and that's going just fine. They spend more time on programming rather than web development however (which again, is fine). I would like to have the option to throw together the odd website for some cash on the side though, so I'm working on improving my skills on my own time.

At this point in time, I'm extremely confident with my XHTML and CSS abilities. I also have some experience with HTML5/CSS3, JavaScript, and PHP. On top of that, I'm fairly comfortable with Python, Java, and C.

What I'm looking for is the next step really. I'm interested in learning some framework related stuff, just to have the ability to do some web applications, and simply because I'm interested in the subject. On top of that, AJAX/jQuery seems to be an emerging trend, so that definitely couldn't hurt.

What I should ask I suppose is what technologies (not necessarily languages) would be worth learning. Is a framework worthwhile, or would I be fine just doing pure server-side programming? It seems there has been more of a push towards client side processing, is this really the case?

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated. If any more information is needed just lemme know.

Thanks,


- Jesse
 
You are on the right track with jQuery. It is awesome and makes ajax calls very easy. jQuery is definitely a skill that will make you a highly desirable web developer.

As far as frameworks... another good choice to pick up on one. Go for a MVC(model, view, controller) framework. It keeps code very clean and easily maintainable(not to mention if someone else has to modify the code down the line it is a lot easier to follow usually). At work we use CodeIgniter(http://codeigniter.com/). It works well and we really haven't ran into any problems with it.

Zend and Symfony are a couple other frameworks that are quite popular. When I was at the php|tek conference in Chicago last May it seemed like atleast 75% of the devs there used Zend. Personally I have no experience with Zend or Symfony. I use CodeIgniter because that is what my employer was using when I hired in and have no reason really to switch.

I hope that helps. If you have any more questions I can try to answer them to the best of my ability.
 
Thank you very much for your input, it's be extremely helpful. I guess I've got a few things to look in to!

If I have any more questions I'll be sure to ask! :D

Thanks again,


- Jesse
 
One thing that you could check out, although very much different from what you have been doing, is Rails. If you take a look at web development jobs right now, probably 30-40% is Rails.

Ruby itself is quite different from C-syntax languages, like PHP. So in that sense I wouldn't recommend it unless you want to learn something completely new.

I don't like Rails myself, but I do like Ruby. In my opinion, Rails is too stringid to it's rules.

I guess I don't like big frameworks in general. They force you to do things you might not want to do.
 
I second CodeIgniter.
jQuery is a big bonus as well

I've used CI on a few projects, it's a very straightforward and flexible framework and there is good community support. The documentation is amazing.
 
Drupal is good. It's a PHP package that started out as just a CMS but has evolved into a more general framework. It's fairly easy to find work if you are familiar with it because it is so popular right now.

jQuery is a must. If you say you know Javascript on a resume, employers will expect you to at least be familiar with jQuery or another similar library.
 
Thank you all very much. I'll install CodeIgniter and start fooling around with it later tonight. Also start learning some jQuery, since I've done a smidgen of it before. If I get some time I'll look into Ruby as well as Rails also.

Thanks again,


- Jesse
 
CEpeep said:
Drupal is good. It's a PHP package that started out as just a CMS but has evolved into a more general framework. It's fairly easy to find work if you are familiar with it because it is so popular right now.

jQuery is a must. If you say you know Javascript on a resume, employers will expect you to at least be familiar with jQuery or another similar library.
Click to expand...

drupal is nice but very bloated and not that flexible for devs.
I spent most of the summer working on a drupal site and most of my day was spent trying to make drupal do what I wanted it to do.

I ended up ditching drupal and restarting the project in CodeIgniter... everyone is happy now
 
Look at sites that are really good with interactive, rich content and dynamic features. Facebook has great UI, a flexible interface, and scales to huge data, users, and hit counts. Google Mail does a really swell job of making a very good interactive mail interface into a web app. Look at various online investing and banking sites -- some are much better than others, offering rich features and interesting interactivity while serving high user loads with lots of data.

Are your skills such that you're able to write sites like these and architect the infrastructure that drives them?
 
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