Web Development further direction

Question

Hi guys looking for some guidance, i have a knowledge of xhtml, css, javascript, php generated from education. But where do i go from here to reach an industrial standard? for example using those 4 languages, i have used notepad++ to write them. I'm particularly focusing on web development here.

What softwares should gain experience of?

for example where i work i looked at the intranet homepage source and i couldn't read it, i imagine it was autogenerated code, a great deal of it was javascript. I'm particularly focusing on web development here.

Where can i learn about building a website generated from a database? (which i've heard mentioned but dont know how to do) which i belive site like imdb are.

Also i was asked in an interview about Java web development and .NET web development. What does this encompass? .NET is the windows framework from what i've researched.

Any help would be fantastic, i'm just really confused and would love some clarification!

Answer 1

Your best bet from here is to get yourself into a junior role somewhere you can learn a development stack. You've mentioned PHP, Java and .NET in your post - it's time to get a job somewhere you can learn how to do it commercially.

If you don't fancy getting a job (this is the best option as someone can actually show you how to do things) then you'll need people to recommend you a good book that takes you right from the beginning. Any book that combines PHP and MySQL is good starting place if you want to write a website that stores data in a database - with the benefit of being able to play with all of these things for free while you are learning.

Notepad++ is great for developing at home, but if you want to do things really well, you'll need to quality IDE. Jetbrains have PHP Storm, which is a fully featured PHP development studio. Microsoft offer Visual Studio (including a free express edition) for developing .NET and there are also tons of options for developing Java, such as Eclipse.

Lots of people are going to start recommending one technology over another - but ignore any advice that seems to be too extremist as it won't benefit you. I am developing in all three technology stacks and wouldn't recommend one above another - they all have their place. Choose the language that feels right to you and when you've more confident you'll find that switching to other languages is reasonably easy.

Answer 2

What kind of job do you seek? Do you want to be a designer of front ends or a developer that can build layers in the front end, business layer and backend?

You say you know PHP, but dont know how to generate pages from the database. There are many articles on the internet about PHP and using databases (for example the MySQL database). You will have to learn more about scripting/programming in PHP and you need to learn about databases (designing tables, SQL, etc). Learn by reading alot and practising with it (build simple dynamic web-sites). I recommend to buy a good book on these topics.

From there you can learn a lot more about both PHP and databases. For example you can learn about advanced IDE's (editors), version control, performance optimization, advanced web interfaces with AJAX, etc..

Java and .NET are both programming environments. They can be used to built web-applications or desktop user interfaces, but that's only a small part of it. If you want to start with these you will have to learn about topics such as object oriented programming.