Web page/Linux newbie help

Anon

Hello. I am planning on taking some training on web site development. I have experience with Windows 95, and a little with Win98, Win 3.1, and Dos 2.11/Basic A (yeah, yeah, back when they invented the wheel). I have successfully developed a web site, over 50 pages, over 1,000 hits per week on average, about 5 years ago, and maintained it for about 3 or 4 years, using the original version of MS FrontPage. I am now planning on developing a web site that is designed as a directory, searchable by zip code or county or other parameters. I am also ditching Windows, and MS in general. I will be teaching myself Linux, and need an idea as to what web design training courses to take regarding web site development in general, and specifically with a web site that is designed to be a directory similar to a yellow pages directory, but with enhanced information/images being returned on each search from a database. Is PHP training for me? From browsing the web, I think I'll need training for HTML, Java, MySQL, C, XML, PHP, and perhaps others. Does this make sense? Or can I use some implementation of a newer version of FrontPage, say 2000, running on Wine/Linux, plus an MySQL training class, and that will be sufficient? Thanks for any help or guidance.

kparker

Don't bother with Frontpage if you're going to be working in an Open Source environment; PHP, Perl, and C will do fine for your programming efforts, MySQL and even moreso PostgreSQL will meet a very large percentage of your database/backend needs, and of course HTML and XML (which you would need to know in any case.) Also some experience with Apache will be useful.

Anon

Thanks for the rapid response Kirk. I hosted my company's previous web site on a web hosting service's servers, and administered it originally via ftp for publishing and Frontpage for editing, and later using Frontpage publishing feature (it grew too big, too many pages and hyperlinks to keep track of to keep using ftp without worrying about broken hyperlinks). If I host the new site on a web hosting company's servers (which I probably will, due to the lack of high speed access at my company), will I still need to train with Apache? Or will that be taken care of by the web hosting firm?

yelvington

Here's my advice, which is worth what you pay for it.

Get a good HTML code editor for Linux such as Quanta or Bluefish. If you're going to do any serious development you need to get acquainted with the code and not use a WYSIWYG tool that generates bad HTML like FrontPage.
Place an emphasis on creating templates in HTML that will be populated with data from a data source (ideally your database) rather than complete pages.
Set up the Apache/MySQL environment on your workstation so that it matches the setup on your remote Web hosting provider. Do your development work locally; use your remote hosting service ONLY for the running/live server.

There are some cool Apache tricks that you'll undoubtedly pick up on the way, but that's not where you need to concentrate. Focus your attention on PHP and MySQL, and on data modeling/table design.

Set Java aside for the time being -- you don't need the distraction. Don't worry about C at all. XML will come to you when you need it.

kparker

will I still need to train with Apache?

That depends on how complicated your hosting needs are, and how intelligent and experienced the techs are at the hosting company. If they can handle all your need w/o you know the first thing about Apache, great--but just as likely, you might have to help explain certain parts of their jobs to them, especially if you want anything the slighest bit out of the ordinary. For example, the folks that host our web site (and they really are better than any one else locally) had no idea we could configure our virtual site to have its own custom error page via an entry in .htaccess. Fortunately, they do allow .htaccess files, so when I learned this we just did it for ourselves.

Anon

Im using a host that has PHP and MySql, I use telnet to work on my MySql database as I dont have to worry about the server end. not that I dont want do it, just one less thing for me to worry about.

Learn PHP and MySql, forget Java for now, DONT USE FRONTPAGE! I wrote some pages for a client and the chick who uploaded them ( she doesnt know anything about writing html at all, except for using this program to ftp files instead of a ftp client like most people)

in short,she screwed up my pages!!!!!!!!!
now I have to get the new files to my client,

use notepad or bbedit and learn to code from the ground up. simple and you learn what the code is actually doing. read some books and ask questions on this site. there is so much talent floating around this site and forum, its overwhelming. 🙂