Which web technology[ies] should I learn?

4 points by hassaanm 15 years ago | 1 comment

Hey guys,

I have never done any web development but am very interested in learning some web technologies. I believe I have a fairly solid understanding about programming, so I think picking up different languages/technologies shouldn't be too difficult. I am a junior in college, majoring in CS, and would like to work on a couple of small projects on the side. One of the first ideas I'd like to work on is a web app (game), where you join a room and play a simple game (roll a dice, do something, wait till your next turn -- repeat until there is a winner). Basically, my question is what technologies should I learn that will help me implement this idea in the best and most easy way?

Thanks!

andyn 15 years ago |

Hi there,

It's good you've got some web app ideas to work towards, that makes learning a lot easier I think.

Firstly you'll want to learn HTML so you can make your pages.

Next you want to decide what language you'll use in the web server - do you know any languages already? I would be biased in this case and suggest Python. But there are other languages that will suit you just as well - Java, Ruby, PHP and so on.

The above would be enough to get you going and write your web games.

Then later on I would recommend:

CSS - To style your web pages.

Javascript - To add more interactivity/functionality to the browser.

SQL - Initially you can just use plain text files or simple key-value stores that most languages have bindings for (I'm thinking of the shelve module in Python for example). But eventually you'll want to store more data or query it in interesting ways.