In the middle of 2013, I decided to try to get some computing experience and learn some web development. This was because I want to work at a tech firm as a Business Analyst and many positions ask that you have some sort of experience with coding. Also, as an aspiring entrepreneur, I thought that I could use my web development knowledge to perhaps deploy a couple of ideas.
Coming from a BBA background, I didn’t really know what was out there. As far as computing experience, I only took the Introduction to the World Wide Web which covers HTML, CSS, and Python, Introduction to Visual Basic which covers basis Visual Basic, and some Management Information Systems courses that covered SQL. I was a solid understanding of SQL so I looked up what kind of coding languages get used with it and found out that I would need to learn a server side language.
When I searched for one, I saw that there were three dominant server side languages that were used in development. From my understanding, they were ASP.NET, JSP, and PHP. I didn’t really know what to choose, so I decided to first take a look at ASP.NET since I already had some experience with Visual Basic.
I must have only spent a couple of days trying out ASP.NET, I felt that it was overwhelming for a beginner. First, I would need to use Visual Studio if I was going to have a good experience. Second, it was difficult to find good introductory resources that used it. So soon after, I decided to put that language off to the side for now and try the next one on the list: JSP.
Now the first book that I got for JSP was “Beginning JSP 2: From Novice to Professional”. It was available through my university’s library and it was fairly easy to follow. I even studied the language for a couple of months and got through the first six chapters. I was using Dreamweaver as my text editing tool and had a local Tomcat server installed on my computer.
But as I got more acquainted with JSP, the more I decided to do research on it. I did this because I wanted to know what it would cost to deploy a web application that used this language. After looking at some articles, I soon found out that renting a server that uses JSP is more expensive than renting one that uses PHP. I saw that this was because PHP is more commonly used and therefore has more servers supporting it. It was then that I decided to switch to PHP.
The first thing I did was look up PHP and SQL textbooks in the library. The one that I found was “PHP and MySQL Development”. Following the instructions in the book, I installed a local version of Apache on my desktop and started working my way through the examples. I was able to keep up with the lessons, but it was difficult to keep myself engaged with the literature. So after awhile I decided to take a break from PHP and focus on other things like going to the gym.
I wasn’t until I found a course on Lynda.com that I started studying PHP again. Amazingly, the reason I was lead to the course on Lynda.com was because my university decided to give their service a try and gave all the students membership. With the videos and exercise files of Lynda.com, I started blazing through PHP. I then found CodeAcademy.com which allowed me to not only work through more PHP exercises, but also learn jQuery, JavaScript, and Python.
With Lynda.com and CodeAcademy.com at my fingertips, I was finally developing some real web development skills and learning some applicable skills that will allow me have a better understanding of coding and create some of my ideas.
John Cubed 