cyberlew15 wrote:As an aspiring web developer at your beginners phase
Well, I should mention a few things, since this thread has pretty much strayed from OOP at times anyway. 😉
I have been publishing HTML since probably 1998 or so. When i first started, I was hand-coding simple pages, and found quite the thrill in the whole "wow! those are my pictures up there in cyber-space for anyone to see! how cool!". I was in a rock band at the time, so i became the web master (which I later handed off the duties to a friend who made a very nice little site, which is basically its current state, complete w/ just the right amount of HTML and Flash coexistence, which i then "maintained" by adding new, updated content, including text and photo galleries, and basically ruined his clean, consistent presentation.). those early pages of mine, before my friend overhauled it, were almost strictly informational, w/ performance dates, a few pictures, and likely way too many silly animated mailbox icons and other silly animated gif's, and the like which used to be so annoyingly popular back in the day! Then i discovered FrontPage and even built a few "webs" for friends based on those FrontPage "themes", which are just utterly "wrong" in retrospect. I recall not having much control over them, as there was a lot of seemingly superfluous FrontPage code. Then I discovered Dreamweaver (probably v3.0 or something), and i thought it was the best thing since sliced bread, cause it let you do what you wanted w/ the code and the design (as opposed to FrontPage which seemed to allow minimal artistic expression for the sake of the "themes", at least for me). Then, i continued down that macromedia road, occasionally stealing some (javascript?) code for special effects here and there-- making fairly decent looking pages, which had under the hood a LOT of extra code, redundant tags, and way too much inline styling. i also was introduced to Perl probably over 5 years ago as well, but, considering my reliance upon DW, only from the plug-and-play use, and not from the writing code use, of course.
About a year ago, a flat-mate friend of mine introduced me to CSS, and the importance of the w3, XHTML, and why it's important to write valid code, adhere to web standards, etc. In the meantime I dabbled w/ Flash, having inherited Studio MX from that same friend, but i was still in the bad habit of letting DreamWeaver write my code for me. It was also around that time that I installed Colfusion MX 6.x (whatever was the version before 7), and started trying to use dynamic content, but the problem was i was too caught up in the whole DreamWeaver / Coldfusion / MS Access integration, that I lost sight of the fact that it all can (and should) be done by hand-coding. How i wasted the hours fooling w/ DW's "application/ database/ recordset" windows, trying to get it to "work right". i was aware of PHP and MySQL, but intimidated by it as it seemed to me that only computer science majors, and genuine geeks might be able to get the hang of it, and all the hand-coding that would be necessary just seemed as it would be such a handicap after having been spoiled by DW's "design view" for so long. then, i finally saw the light. i ditched DreamWeaver only too recently for EditPlus, and PHP, and CSS. I should have done this a LONG time ago. better late than never, i suppose.
so, i do have some experience w/ javascript (from a cut and paste perspective, and i think javascript, and not java, but i'm not sure), and a little bit of flash knowledge, albeit, probably the bandwidth hogging kind! so, that is how i ended up here. it's as if i've come full circle, with a lot of wayward wandering in the meantime. i'm proud to say that i've left dreamweaver behind, and i haven't touched it since i started studying CSS and PHP at the early part of this summer (except for some instances where i needed the FTP for some of the "sites" i stored there, and have since lost the login password info, so i kind of "had to" use DW for management of those files.
as for struggling w/ PHP, i don't think i've found it to be a struggle. i understand it all pretty well, but i am far from mastery. i will need to do a LOT of sample projects and experimentation before i'm ready to write even simple web apps. the CSS is coming along nicely as well, but again, i have a LOT to learn there too.
so, that is reason for my curiosity. i have been involved w/ a lot of stuff for many years, but during that time, i was very misled by dreamweaver, so i find myself having to re-learn a lot of stuff. thankfully, most of it has come to me fairly easily. since i've started, i have been very devoted to learning. it's all i do in my spare time. work the 9 to 5, come home and study, and study all weekend. you might say i'm obsessed w/ it, but oh well. it's what i want to do. i did the same thing at age 15 when i was first studying guitar, which later became my career. i am intent on learning as much as i can. i would love to work for a web development company, but would prefer to work for myself.
on that note, i'd like to say that i have been discouraged by a friend (a very knowledgeable friend, who is an ace w/ PHP, CFM, JSP, etc) who claims that there's no money in web design anymore. i find that hard to believe. and that is not to say that the only reason i'm learning is because i plan to get rich by it. that is not the case. it is simply my desire to learn. if i am able to make a living by it, or to supplement my 9 to 5 w/ it, then great. but at this point, i just desire to learn as much as i can.
