Web programming tutorial [closed]

Question

I'm a programmer with some experience working on various languages and platforms, but I lack any web development experience (apart of some very basic HTML produced by PHP).

I'm looking for a tutorial about the basics of web programming under Linux. I am less interested with apache configuration and server maintenance which I know quite well, but with the actual building of a website using modern techniques. I am familiar with python, but I'll handle any scripting language quite well.

Do you have any recommendations? Can you tell anything about the W3Schhools tutorials?

Bunch of thanks,

Udi

Answer 1

This is a fairly broad question you are asking. You have to be aware that there are a lot of potential answers, the ones already given here being decent ones. And you have to be aware that it is very much a platform decision that you make, whatever tutorial you choose. And that's because web (application) development is a complex thing that can be addressed on various levels (particularly outside the MS world).

• I have no close knowledge about the W3Schools you mention, but on first glance it looks they will be teaching you a lot of basic frontend technology: HTML, XHTML, Javascript, CSS and the like. This is not bad and will give you a solid foundation in these things. But web development is usually not done on this level, as it is too tedious and inflexible for larger applications. And you would be missing out on backend/database technology altogether.

• Then there are platforms (and I would guess this is the majority) which have a templating approach. You implement page and business logic in a mix of HTML and programming code in some language (Python, Perl, PHP, ...) within an HTML file that is then processed by an engine to generate the final HTML for the user interface and transaction code for the database. Django and TurboGears are the prominent Python representatives of this, Ruby on Rails probably the biggest name currently. But there are a lot others (how about Scala/Lift?), so it's worth taking the time to see which one you like best. They usually do a good job for the database handling. On the UI side you still have page changes.

• In that vein there are platforms that try to move away from HTML with embedded code to a pure programmatical approach. You just write code and use specific APIs of the given platform. "Compiling" your project in one way or the other will then generate all the necessary stuff which you have to deploy in a runtime environment. I think Google's GWT and Eclipse RAP are such approaches, and if you think, dream and breath in Java, this is probably for you.

• Yet another approach is interesting when page changes in the browser (the most disruptive part of the web experience) is not good enough anymore, when you want desktop-like user interfaces. The way to attack this is to create "fat web clients", with lots of interaction logic built in, usually in Javascript, and have them interact with a server backend only for essential data transfer using Ajax, REST or RPC protocols. Candidates for the client technology are e.g. qooxdoo or Dojo. On the server side you can still use whatever technology you are comfortable with (from RoR to Servlets and beyond). If I had my pick, I would choose qooxdoo for the frontend, and Erlang/CouchDb on the backend.

You have specifically asked about tutorials, and I haven't mentioned a lot. The point I was trying to make was whatever you choose, it is most likely that you will invest quite a bit of time and effort in that technology since they are all quite deep, and will stick with it for some time. During your evaluation you will also check the instructional material for the given platform (don't forget online videos - they're big these days), but this will inevitably be specific. AFAICS, there is no such thing as a "general introduction" to web programming.