By basics you need to learn what the moving parts of web "programming" is all about. Understand the relationship between your application (or static pages) and the server they are being hosted on and what is involved in the user experience of accessing those.

The fact that you stated you don't even know what a web server is tells me you are at the parking garage level of understanding and you want to get to the penthouse.

Just like learning how to play a game you need to understand the rules and in the case of a sport such as football or soccer you sometimes even need to understand the rationale behind the rules.

Knowing what a web server is and what it does for you and how it does it is a good place to start on your journey towards learning how to do web programming. There is pain in the learning (pain is weakness leaving your mind) but the rewards for going through that pain are paid off when you get to the point you are doing actual programming and understand what is happening to your code in that environment.

Steps:

  1. gain an understanding of the web programming environment. Such as what web servers are out there, what they do and how they do it. How does DNS affect your web programming environment? What is browser independent coding all about?
  2. gain an understanding of basic HTML. What are the rules of good markup?
  3. (optional) learn some javascript. This will come in handy later on.
  4. Read the Tutorials on web programming here at the Monastery
  5. Look at the documentation for CGI and understand the examples. Thoroughly.
  6. Come up with a simple (and I stress, simple) web application and avoid the temptation to jump right in and try to write that "killer app" for all your friends to ooh and ahh at. You're not ready at this point and you are setting yourself up for Epic Fail®.

That will keep you busy for a while, keep you off the streets but hopefully not interfere with your studies. :-)

Peter L. Berghold -- Unix Professional
Peter -at- Berghold -dot- Net; AOL IM redcowdawg Yahoo IM: blue_cowdawg

In reply to Re^3: Web Programming: For Beginners by blue_cowdawg
in thread Web Programming: For Beginners by perl.j

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