Best Way to Begin Learning Web Application Design [closed]

Question

I'm a long time hobbyist programmer interested in getting into web application development. I have a fair amount of personal experience with various non-web languages, but have never really branched over to web applications.

I don't usually have any issues learning new languages or technologies, so I'm not worried about which is the "best" language or web stack to work with. Instead, I'd like to know of any recommended resources (books, articles, web sites, maybe even college courses) that discuss web application design: managing and optimizing server interaction, security concerns, scalability, and other topics that fall under design rather than implementation.

What would you recommend for a Standalone Application Developer wanting to branch out into Web Development?

Answer 1

There is a wide variety of web application languages you could get into. The ones I have most experience with (and therefore will be talking about here) are PHP, eRuby and Ruby on Rails. All of these have good tutorials available on the internet - I'll link to some of them below.

Which to choose depends on exactly what you're looking to do. Using PHP and eRuby you have to do most things yourself - whereas Ruby on Rails will do lots of stuff for you (useful, but can also be dangerous if you don't know what you're doing). Ruby on Rails is good for doing database related things - for example the standard CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) application. The standard kind of app Ruby on Rails (often abbreviated to RoR) tutorials teach you is a blog application (Create entries, Read entries, Update entries, Delete entries) or an Address Book Application. It is possible to do many of these sort of applications almost in one line of code - using RoR's 'scaffold' function.

PHP and eRuby make you do more of the work yourself - but this can be better in some situations. PHP is more well known and used than eRuby, but I like the Ruby language so I tend to like using eRuby. These are both good for doing simple applications (like contact forms on websites) or more complex applications (phpBB - a piece of forum software is written in php).

As for which one to choose - I'd have a play with them and see what you think. Try running through the first few bits of a tutorial with each and see how whether you like it or not.

Here come the links to various tutorials:

PHP

• PHP 101
• PHP Intro from W3Schools

eRuby

• Beginning eRuby - not great, but shows you how you can embed it in HTML
• Try Ruby in your Browser - helps you learn Ruby which you need to know for eRuby

Ruby on Rails

• Rolling with Ruby on Rails - the latest 'revisited' version for the latest version of RoR
• Rolling with Ruby on Rails part 2

There are a few tutorials to get you started. Some of these take you through installing the necessary software (webserver and anything else needed - eg. php or ruby) and some don't. A good way to get Apache (webserver), MySQL (db) and PHP installed on windows is to use XAMPP. If you're on linux then apache, mysql and php will be in your package repositories and there may be distro specific guides to setting them up.

Answer 2

A lot of languages have web counterparts. JSP for Java, Rails for Ruby, Django for Python, etc. That might be a lead.

If you want to go for the platform with arguably the biggest user base (and with that, the biggest pile of tutorials and examples), go for PHP.

I strongly advise on looking into various frameworks though. For every web-oriented language there's bound to be a lot of resources that take away the trouble of writing all the low-level plumbing code, so you can focus on the stuff that matters. Personally I almost exclusively use .NET, but I've heard about a bunch of nice PHP frameworks, like the Zend platform and CakePHP (for MVC development).

If you intend to also use javascript in your applications to give that nice web 2.0 feel to your applications, please, use a library that hides the messy browser details. You'll go nuts if you try to do all the cross-browser scripts yourself. Some good ones are Prototype and jQuery.

Answer 3

Eloquent JavaScript and AppJet offer great tutorials that allow you to follow along while you learn.

Once you cover all the basics, Ajaxian should answer many of the questions you have about application design, etc. Not only do they post many excellent articles on these topics, but you should explore many of the sites they link to, as these sites usually also provide a wealth of info.

When it comes to server interactions, know your options. Ajax isn't all there is. Research technologies like Comet and JSON-RPC, as well as looking at various server-side frameworks that provide easy access to JavaScript such as DWR, Jayrock, or any tool that exposes your functions to JavaScript using whatever language you choose to use on the server.