Which is why a vast part of the web still uses PHP, right?
Ima a little tired of having young snots who learned their stuff last week telling the world that everything over two weeks old is shit.
For one thing, this was not and was never intended to be a working-developer conference on best practices, nor a guide to someone looking for employment next week as a web developer for ESPN. It was a guy who admitted he knew jack squat and wanted to get a good start for some hobby aims.
To that end, HTML (concentrating on HTML5), CSS (concentrating on CSS3) and basic Javascript and PHP (relatively easy to understand, use and get into dynamic pages and coding, and still quite useful at the lower level) are very good places for such a novice to start.
If the OP decides his calling is to be God’s own website manager, he can move on to server-based platforms and dot-net and dynamic code and Ruby on fucking Rails. But he’s not some kind of lumbering dinosaur idiot because he doesn’t *start *there.
Maybe the posters in this thread have never laid hands on a desktop system, written HTML code or had so much as a static error page in their sites. That’s wonderful. You’re bleeding-edge geniuses. But those things are not obsolete, not for novices and not for users who aren’t building a megacorp’s entertainment site.
You guys know everything except perspective and judgment. Try those sometime.
I’ve decided to concentrate on static pages for now… I’m doing an online course on HTML 5 and CSS 3 which seems to be sticking. Once I’ve finished that, I’ll have a decent grounding in the basics, and I’ll start thinking about the server-side stuff.
Thanks once again for all the comments and opinions, it’s all helpful.
Like I said, I use python but the idea that php needs to go away is ludicrous. Not to say that php is the only way to do this but lets say you want to a webpage to be dynamic. Here is the php pseudocode for it
open html file
read file into a string
make the change using str_replace (oldstring, newstring)
write back to the file
close file
Look it up on w3schools and you can be ajaxing your html in no time. Not as much fun as greping your awk…
Now I’m sure that others will have a more elegant or “current” way to do it but are those ways really for a beginner teaching themselves?
A little bit of PHP is useful in early stages, with “semi-static” pages that can be updated easily. Once a site goes past about five or six pages, things like updating headers and footers manually on each page can get tedious.
A good ‘hello world’ for PHP is to make your page headers and footers $includes, and put the relevant common code (typically a page copyright and contact notice in the footer) in a separate file. That way, you can change, say, the copyright date by editing one file rather than four or six or twenty.
Once you get to building some good part of a nominally static site with included files, you’re ready to look at slightly more complex coding - and you will have saved yourself a lot of tedious update editing and mistakes in the process.