Re: Guidance

On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 1:04 PM, Nathan Rixham <nrixham@gmail.com> wrote: > > Matty Sarro wrote: > > I understand and agree completely, and I really appreciate the help. My goal > > isn't so much to keep from re-writing code, but to have a pretty firm > > foundation to stand on before I really begin. I mean, with c++ or c, all I > > needed was the language, and that was pretty much it. I could do everything > > from there. This seems a lot more like its a marriage of a ton of different > > technologies :) > > > > On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 3:32 PM, Daniel Brown <parasane@gmail.com> wrote: > > > >> On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 3:01 PM, Stut <stuttle@gmail.com> wrote: > >>> Maybe it's just me but I usually end up rewriting everything I write > >>> at least twice. That's just a fact of life and I've found that I end > >>> up with far better code that way than I do by trying to get it right > >>> first time. It also tends to be quicker. > >> [snip!] > >>> In short, learn by doing. It's served me well. > >> I made it even shorter, Stut. ;-P > >> > >> He's exactly right, Matty. It's a form of evolution called > >> "versioning". No programmer gets everything perfect the first (or > >> usually even second, third, eighth) time. Good, usable, lasting code > >> will be written and rewritten very often. Look at almost any code > >> that's been around and distributed (including the PHP project itself) > >> and you'll notice that there are dozens of versions, because over the > >> years new ideas have come about to make it more productive, more > >> economical, and all-around better. > >> > >> -- > >> </Dan> > >> > >> Daniel P. Brown > >> Senior Unix Geek > >> <? while(1) { $me = $mind--; sleep(86400); } ?> > >> > > > > Indeed it is Matty, here's the way I would approach > > > 1 (X)HTML > view source and w3schools are your friends here > > 2 CSS > just the basic will get you started, worth reading W3C CSS spec > particularly the BOX Model [http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-box/] > > 3 Make a project website in plain XHTML with CSS > > 4 ECMAScript (javascript) > Make your static website do a couple of nice things with some javascript. > > you can't expect to program anything we related if you can't format the > output! > Oddly, I learned JavaScript and PHP before truly learning XHTML. By the way, I really hate <font> tags, so learn XHTML! Also, if you're learning JavaScript, please learn W3C DOM, and not the document.write(Ugliness). :) -- -Casey