Change of focus out of programming?

Get yourself some of these skills for web tech if you haven't already:

Photoshop - Any image editor. Become familiar with it and be able to create impressive yet small file size visualizations for the sites you work on. Get familiar with some basic techniques behind making things look 3d or pop out etc etc.

ajax - The technique of having a webpage request additional data from the server and displaying it without refreshing the page at all.

database administration - Learn the ins and outs of optimizing a Database. This includes optimizing table structures, indexs and paging. Also query optimization, things like Query Analyzer (i'm sure others) break down a query into the individual tasks so you can find ways to optimize it (a view for a group of tables that are always joined the same in many queries).

C++ - Go back and really learn C++. You'll be able to code a hell of a lot more than webpages. Learn about the existing libraries and how to use them effectively to cut down on the amount of wheels you need to reinvent.

Style Sheets (CSS) - Make sure you can at least manipulate a page using CSS. Better yet learn the best practices behind CSS so you can create entire sites with a single (short and simple) style sheet.

Grab some PC Magazines or search the PC Magazine websites (or other computer mags) for articles on programming tools. Get familiar with all of them when you have spare time you want to use for this.

Every programming tool you are familiar with is another utility belt container you can carry around with you.



As for intresting work keep on eye on various craiglists sites and just read through them. You'll see some things pop up that catch your eye. Some jobs you didn't realize existed etc.

Tron edited this comment on November 5, 2006, 2:27 pm

Programming was always a hobby for me so making it a career choice was pretty simple. Before taking the job I have now, I had no professional php experience, just experience using it in my free time to create scrabbleship and garbagewater. It's great to be well rounded in this industry so you can pick up something new as a career choice when you want to.

Web programming is a constantly growing industry and I can't see it going away any time soon. It's a great choice if you're interested in it and with the wealth of jobs out there it's easy to move on when you get tired of one project.

Tron gave some great suggestions if you are indeed looking to become more of a programmer. There's a warning tho, programming can get mighty dull. You should look for a job which encourages creativity and embraces new technology. It helps with staying interested and motivated in your job.

Oh and if you're interested in learning some php I could always use some help on this site. I tried getting Tron involved but I think he's too lazy. :p

I'm mighty interested in anything with user-driven content. I guess a lot of people have termed this kind of thing Web 2.0. I've read up a little on Ruby on Rails. I've got extremely strong database foundation, because that's what I've been doing for the past 4 years primarily. So Oracle, MySQL, SQLServer, whatever, I can handle all sorts of things within this realm. Lots of design experience and data-modeling. This might be useful.

CSS, AJAX, PHP are all the hardskills I need to bite into.

Honestly, I'd love to try to make an interesting website/blog/whatever and make some scratch of it...and with my other time freelance.

I have some photochop skillz. I have lots of music/audio skillz...

I dunno..where should I start? Get some books? Download Apache and Mysql? Try to start messign around with CSS?

I'd like to publicly appologize to jesse for being a noob. But, for now at least, my heart just isn't in it anymore.

Back on topic, if he's willing I think you should take up gemo on his offer to work on garbagewater. The way he has it set up is rather elegant (esp compared to what I recall of the first few versions and scrabbleship). It also makes wide use of php, css and ajax, all of which were on your list it seems.

Where to start is really a personal choice. I've met people that like to read the book about something first and than give it a shot and learn as they go. I'd much rather read through an existing program and than give it a try using simple reference materials.

I learned CSS not too long ago, and there are definately "right" and "wrong" ways to do it that aren't immediately clear (leastwise weren't to me).

Try here to witness the power of CSS. Make sure to select other designs for a full experience :)

I've personally always had more success in jumping into some existing code and playing around with it when learning new technology then just reading a book. But that's just something that works for me and not everyone. I know a lot of people who personally learn better by just reading through a book.

If you are interested in jumping in and playing around with mysql/php then I'd suggest installing XAMPP. It's a distribution of apache, mysql and php, all the things you need to start developing. In the past it was always a pain in the ass to get a dev environment up and running but XAMPP makes it quite easy.

PHP.net is an awesome resource to use while learning PHP and also as a professional PHP developer. Their documentation is very well maintained and allows for user comments which can be quite helpful at times. They also have a simple tutorial for people new to PHP if you want to read through that.

But like I said if you want to help out with GarbageWater or just look through the code for how to do certain things just let me know. I can setup a SVN account for you to pull the source code down.

Do you know how to program at all Dave? I forgot what you graduated as.

If you learn one programming language, you pretty much know them all. The syntax is a little bit different in each, but the concepts are the same.

The fact that you have a strong DB background is good if you'd like to do more user driven web stuff.

If you don't care about the technical aspect of how to set up a web server that could do php/mysql or whatever server-side language and database combo you want to use, then I think jesse's site would be a great start. When you only have to think about uploading some lines of code to a web server, it makes focusing on the actual coding and learning that much more interesting.

I would recommend PHP and MySQL as a starting point, just because it's simple, free, and there's a million resources on the web.

When i learned PHP by myself years ago, I typed in "PHP Tutorial" in google. Of course, I already knew javascript and programing concepts in general, so my goal was mostly to figure out how PHP pulled/requested info from MYSQL. The rest was just alot of searching out examples that did relatively the same thing that I wanted to do.