Skills

Trojan

Hi all.

I've been thinking about doing a bit of web development on the side when I go back to college,
and I'm wondering what kind of skills I'll need to develop interactive sites.

Should I put a bit of work into learning Perl, PHP3, TCL etc? What platform should I develop under? Is linux the way to go for this stuff?

Anyone got any thoughts on the matter?

cheers,
Al.

SantaHoe

Well for the actual site itself, I'd reccomend Perl, Javascript, dhtml, and Macromedia Flash/dreamweaver...
Good luck.

Karla

I've been thinking a lot about this lately but isn't Linux the perfect OS to create a website in?
Sure, it doesn't have all those fancy tools like Flash etc (yet ) but it does have Apache, Perl, PHP, The GIMP, MySQL, Java as well as various other scripting languages.
Compare that with Win 9x or even NT.
PSW and IIS suck, end of story.
You'll have to buy third party graphics packages.

One thing Linux does lack, and this is the most important item, is a good browser. Netscape sucks donkey d!ck. Let's hope Mozilla can save it.

Websites are becoming more and more like applications, if you don't believe me read this -> http://xml.com/pub/1999/10/tokyo.html ,
and what's really needed are skilled individuals who are able to craft these dynamic sites.
I'd really love to see a few courses in this kind of thing (PHP Apache MySQL) but all the Web Development courses around are Frontpage and HTML and PSP. Anyone know of any good courses? Preferably in Cork

Oh and as for necessary skills I'd start with Perl, CGI programming with Perl is really easy with the CGI.pm module and if you ever want to move to a PHP/MySQL combination you won't have to learn much.
PHP and Perl are very similar.

And that's all I have to say about that

SantaHoe

Well even before you learn all that stuff, I'd reccomend that you whack out a few sites on GeoCities, just to see what's what.

GeoCites and Fortunecity are both shíte hosts, they don't support Perl or anything, they also limit the size of each uploaded file, and check their extensions.

But if you want to concentrate on the interactive part, you'll really need some Macromedia Flash.


PS. Have a laugh at my new site:
www.gibworld.com/grotto
It's only new, so the layout still sucks, but If you use M$ Inernet Explorer you'll see a lovely liquid banner!


[This message has been edited by Dead{o}Santa (edited 30-11-99).]

Trojan

I had reckoned Linux as a main development platform, aside from Dreamweaver etc, with Win9x as a test platform with communicator/NN3/IE3/4/5 etc.

I'll need to get an eval copy from Macromedia, and a php3 environment, most rest comes with Linux doesn't it?

Where are things going with databases? This is an area I know fsck all about... what are the major players (in relation to www) - oracle/MS etc?

btw very interesting article there karla.

Al.

Karla

Yeah, Tim O'Reilly's pretty cool

As for Databases, all medium to large websites are using them already and basically any small website can benefit from a database too.

Sure Oracle and SQL Server are the big players in all this, but look out for a little thing called MySQL -> http://www.mysql.org

It's a small, lighting fast RDBMS and it's pretty cool for websites when you stick it together with Perl or PHP.

I'm only starting to get into it at the moment and it's kinda tough (no formal training, makes EVERYTHING that little bit harder ) but there's plenty of info around the web for this thing.

Oh yeah it's also free.
Well, the older versions are free, buy SuSE 6.2 and it'll be bundled with that.

I found a pretty good looking host server too, everything seems to be there and it's Irish. Anyone got any dirt on these guys?
http://www.webworld.ie

Pretty cheap too

Trojan

Dunno the co. but sure looks good.

DevShed is pretty class, you got any more like that? Must post bookmarks file...