php html flash website design tools for beginner

Question

I have 5 years of C#, Perl and SQL programming experience but I've just found a web designer and developer job. I dont know anything about it but need to design a website using PHP, flash and HTML, whatever it is. Can you give me pointers on where to start to learn it all ASAP and start designing the website? I downloaded WAMP and learned to configure it. Other then that I dont know what to do next. They gave me a few pictures to incorporate, but I dont know how :)

Answer 1

The perl will help you. Most everything you need to know is at the PHP site. For example, you might want to start with the page on Shockwave Flash functions.

Answer 2

i'm assuming you're using windows so the list might be different for a unix / mac setup for a php editor, i would suggest NuSphere {not freeware}, eclipse {freeware, usable on unix, sometimes freezes} or netbeans {freeware, nice shortcuts, latest version doesn't hang}. They all have code completion, and some degree of code folding for functions. For html editing, notepad++ is a nice editor, it has some nice features for editing, and for the flash part... adobe has all the tools i used so you might want to use that

that was the editor part, you can use notepad or any other text editor if you want.

for the "how to do it" part, i'm assuming you don't have any previous knowledge of web programming / design, so you can start on www.htmlgoodies.com for some basic information on tags and such. Another site with very useful examples is www.tizag.com .

Hope this helps you .

By the way, to access your website, create a folder in the wamp document root and after you start the server go to localhost/

Answer 3

I dont suspect that PHP will give you allot of problems, there is a whole lot of examples on the web and the documentation on www.php.net is great. Especially the comments. The naming convention of PHP will make you pull out a few hairs though.

If you have to set up a rather complex website it could give you a nice jumpstart to look into one of many frameworks available like the zend framework, kohana or symfony to name a few. They all have great tutorials on their site which will help you learn PHP in the process. (I suspect Kohana of these 3 is the 'easiest')

Flash, is something completely different, although it gets more mature with each version, especially the latest version supporting Actionscript 3. As a language it's not to far off from C#. There are great tutorials on http://www.gotoandlearn.com/ or on the Adobe website.

Tying everything together is HTML, also the most frustrating part of creating websites in my experience with the different browsers resolutions and quirks. My favorite HTML resource is alistaprt.

The tools I use for php are Eclipse with the PDT plugin. For HTML I use Eclipse with the WDT plugin. And use the Flash CS4 software for actionscript development. Though you might want to try the new Adobe Flash builder (again, an eclipse plugin).

Answer 4

Ok, PHP is much like Perl or C++ and is pretty easy to learn if you can get your hands on a few example websites or 'Learn PHP in 21 Days' kind of books. If you don't know HTML then PHP isn't where you should start, you should get a good grasp of HTML before tackling PHP, its like HTML but more... err hyper :P Flash is a completely different ball game when it comes to your first website... I don't know where to point you for help with that one though.

Answer 5

How on earth did get a web dev/designer job when you're lacking some of the requisite skills??

PHP is related to Perl, which will help a little, however you'll be wanting to use OOP style which is different.

Seriously consider using a MVC framework such as Zend or Kohana.

You need to lean HTML ASAP before anything else, e.g. how to use an <img /> tag...

Re: Flash, hopefully you'll only need to incorporate 3rd party flash objects into the page, which is straightforward (once you know HTML). Otherwise, good luck.

Answer 6

For writing Actionscript, I highly recommend downloading the free FlashDevelop IDE.

It has excellent code autocompletion and syntax checks that have made my Flash development much faster than if I used something like Notepad++.