[GolfyMcG]

Hello everyone,

I'm VERY new to web development and was looking for advice on where to start on teaching myself. The ultimate goal is to build a website that manages user profiles for numerous individuals. The profiles will all have specific statistics that correspond to the user's activities that are entered by the user over an extended period of time. Its essentially a gradebook where the students or teachers could enter their grades. The data will then be used to generate graphs and charts to help better understand how they're doing in certain areas. Advice on how to start building a database strikes me as the most pressing of concerns because I tried to figure some of it out and it just confused me. In the end it would also be great to be able to have the users upload information from a mobile application.

I know some HTML, CSS, and Javascript but I can't stress just how new I am to this. I'm looking for general advice from experienced programmers as to how they got started and got to where they are. I'd also love some book recommendations where I can teach myself how to do this all.

Thank you in advance for the help!

[Creecher]

Well, first of all, you'll want to look at tutorials. Lots and lots of tutorials, which are here on this site and all over the internet. Secondly, since you'll be managing user profiles and what not, I assume you'll need to learn PHP and MySQL (databases ect.), and again, these tutorials are everywhere.

So it's not really "where" to begin, it's "when" and "with what". So, take it one step at a time, and enjoy yourself


Also, for a good PHP book, check out "Visual Quickstart Guide - PHP 3rd Edition" by Larry Ullman and more of his books.

This post has been edited by Creecher: 12 January 2012 - 01:47 PM

[Dormilich]

Creecher, on 12 January 2012 - 09:46 PM, said:

Secondly, since you'll be managing user profiles and what not, I assume you'll need to learn PHP and MySQL (databases ect.), and again, these tutorials are everywhere.

recommendation from a long-time PHP user, when starting with database interaction, go for PDO or MySQLi. mysql_* functions are outdated and inefficient. (i.e. don’t start with the bad when you can start with the good ones).

[Shane Hudson]

I think a good start would be to just make a practise website in only html and css, javascript if you wish but no server side. Perhaps clone the look and feel of a relatively simple site, without looking at source code. Obviously just for practise, don't put it in a portfolio or anything. Once it is done, post it up on here for us to review.

You will want your basic markup and styling to be pretty flawless, then from that you can learn (in a similar way) a server side language. PHP is the most common, especially for beginners, but ruby and python (among others) are also good languages. Or if you are a .net person you can use asp.net, though I do not get along well with it haha!

I am interested to learn more about what Dormilich said about not using mySQL... I have not really had the chance to look into alternatives, maybe I ought to soon! These days I mainly stick to front end development (I am good enough to charge nicely, I am not so much for backend!) so need to delve more into the back end.

Make sure you keep reading AND practising, looking at well formed code and just develop good practises!

This post has been edited by Shane Hudson: 12 January 2012 - 04:57 PM

[JackOfAllTrades]

You might also consider a PHP framework, such as CakePHP, CodeIgniter, or Symfony. There may be others out there as well, but those are the three that come to mind.

What will be very important is structuring your database properly from the beginning, so that's a very good place to start.

[creativecoding]

For learning PHP, I recommend this. Read it page by page and practice every line of code you see there. If you don't understand something, look it up here. Makes sure to ask questions if you need help.

Also, I would actually advise against starting with a php framework. You should fully understand what the language is doing as well as what it can do before you dive into using other people's code.