Be Excellent To Each Other

We have a lot of web developing super brains here so can you give us some recommendations peeps?

In a few months I'm planning to be get some hosting and stuff, so I can start fiddling about. With the end result being that I turn into an elite web haxxor.

So I can play better on the web. More skeptobot stuff etc. But currently all I can do is write a bit of html. Badly.

What should I learn and how? Any good books and guides? The cheaper the better. Obviously.

My Future Plans include:

• Move Skeptobot to a wordpress blog, so it can be more fancy. Including click throughs for big articles (but not all) and so side projects can all be kept together better.
• Eventually I want to make a shop that sells some things. (My own things, not via cafepress or whatever)
• I would like to have the skills to make something like Grims text-on-picture automatic thing.

TL:DR How did you becoming web developing super brains? Because I would like to copy.

Wordpress took about 10 minutes to setup with their instructions once I worked out that I needed to pay Fasthosts for a database.

You can do most of the fancy Wordpress stuff via free templates and stuff it seems. I haven't fully explored it yet.

For design, Mr Grannell's book is good if you want to learn more about CSS and how pages are laid out etc.

I'm from the more amateur end of web development so I've slowly learnt bits of this and that from messing about with my own hosting (with various content management systems like Joomla) and from stuff I've done at work. Tizag has some decent tutorials - I've only used the PHP ones but there are some html and css tutorials there too.

Yep. Get CSS learnt. It means you can have one file that can change styles on all the pages of your site.

I'm self-taught. I started learning HTML by trial and error way back in '96. I would take a website from the Amiga Format CD-ROM and fuck about with the HTML, making note of what changed and what didn't. Then I got HTML 4.0 for Dummies and went through that, taking on board what it said.

I didn't really start getting into CSS until about 2002/2003, which was about a year before I landed my first web development job. Again, I went through trial and error on other people's CSS, and through tutorials on the Internet.

PHP I started in about 2003 also, with the help of SAMS Teach Yourself PHP4 in 24 Hours. This gave me the basics, although like almost all PHP books, it teaches you bad habits right from the start, so I learnt (using the PHP Manual and other PHP forums) what best practices.

And now I've been doing professional PHP development for 6 years.

Hello Sir. How bad form would it be to ask with some help that's probably a little more time consuming than pointing me to the relevant pages in the PHP manual?

I'm stuck with a conditional/cascading dropdown menu.

Thanks for the advice!

Gotta race off now, but will bug you all about this again later.

That's been my concern for a bit. All the PHP knowledge I've got has been from tutorials and tinkering with code snippets so stuff like security hasn't come into it so far. Hopefully work will be sending me on a PHP course before long and from that I'll realise all the stuff I've done so far could've been written in a single line of code.

All PHP teaches you bad habits, so I wouldn't worry about it too much. Or have they finally added Fisher Price stuff like database connection pools now?

I can try and help. Not tonight though

Hello! Yes learn CSS. And XHTML. If you want to ever get good at web stuff, don't use WordPress. I learnt PHP by basically doing everything myself. I think (think) I've just about shrugged off all the bad habits now, after about six years.

This thread is sort of relevent.

Anyway.

In HTML, why are the <select> and <textarea> inputs not <input type="select"> and <input type="textarea">?

Probably because <select> has child elements in the form of <option> (and <input> can't have child elements), and <textarea> can have all sorts of weird characters between <textarea> and </textarea> that the HTML spec probably wasn't designed to accept as part of a normal attribute.

The only character <textarea> can have that <input> can't have is a carriage return. Still, that's probably the reason.
It's silly

Nah, that ain't silly.

What IS silly is that there's no way (except with CSS3, which handily is supported by about... err... no browsers ) to apply styles to <input> elements based on their type attribute. So you have to do <input type="text" class="text" />

Or use javascript, I guess.

Yeah, I used JavaScript on a recent project to loop through all <inputs> and assign a className based on their type attribute. Bit of a sledgehammer solution though.

I have two rules of thumb for web development:

1) Don't use PHP. Ever.
2) CSS sucks. I don't care what the zealots say, its the most half-arsed mechanism for laying out documents ever invented. However, its the "best" solution you have, so prepare for some serious frustration.

I'm re-doing our company site (again) and it's times like these that make me glad I don't do web design full-time as making web pages reflect photoshop mock-ups to the nearest pixel is less-than-fun.

Today I learned that you can create multi-columned lists using CSS and floated <li> but if you do, IE and Opera won't display the bullet image. Helpful.

Ooh, I love hearing reasons for this! Go on!

It makes your webserver stop responding all the time

To be fair, PHP is utter shit when the scoring mechanism is "how easy is it to write insecure code".

But if you actually put some effort into learning decent coding practices, PHP is far easier than most other languages. If you can get around the inconsistencies in function parameter orders and that sort of shit.

I'll look into what that is one day.

God, yes. Especially when REGISTER_GLOBALS used to be on by default.

Huzzah!

/gets soapbox out

It's slow, bloated and insecure. The language features are incredibly bare-bones, including a really weak OO implementation, no first-class functions (and all the cool features you get with them, like closures). It's weakly typed, but I wouldn't call it dynamic and lacks namespaces. It promotes tight-coupling with the UI and a really big gripe of mine is that each subsequent release is incompatible with the last!

Unlike a good, feature rich and powerful language, like say Python, PHP gives you enough rope to hang yourself with and then helps you rig the gallows and tie the knot.

Disagree: PHP5.3 has some quite good OO stuff (with first-class functions and closures).
Disagree: Each release is incompatible - well, it is a bit, but no more than, say, MySQL
Disagree: PHP isn't weakly typed. It's far, far worse than that (although it does have namespaces).
Agree: Everything else

The main problem with it is that it's easy, which means idiots can do it. And when idiots do things, they do stuff badly.

Oh God - you know what that means, don't you? The world is about to be inundated with about a million different books titled "Design Patterns in PHP" - whereby each and every author trots out the trusty GoF patterns and inexpertly and incorrectly shows how to implement them in PHP!

Arrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggghhhhhhhhh!

Hello!

Incidentally, I did get web hosting and currently I have this secret beta version of skeptobot.


http://www.rockpaperskeptic.net

Wordpress and others stuff for idiots used so far.

Gona keep the two sites in sync for a while then switch skeptobot to it down the line.

That and ' and " without fucking about worrying about escaping them.

I thought of a little project on my drive home - a Windows custom installation system, written as a Script Host. Actions provided by COM interfaces exposed to the scripts, flow/UI determined by the script, and that. Possibly, but probably not, a web browser as the/a main UI component.

Yes, I hate InstallShield and (to a lesser extent) MSI that much.

Do you want to learn to do this purely to improve skeptobot, or because you fancy learning something computermabobby?

If it's the later, why not try learning a "real" language like Python or Ruby in a non-web context? After you've played with them for a while you can try out their web frameworks and all that.

(which in a way is another reason not to use PHP -- it's really limited to web development only. Yeah, sure, there's a shell executable available, but what sane person is really going to write a non-web script in PHP? :/)