I want to start learning webapp development. Where do I start?

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finalgt

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Maybe my Google Fu is weak, but every search I've tried invariably leads to articles from sites like about.com from 8 years ago about how to make an Angelfire family album in HTML.

It's starting to become professionally desirable for me to jump into programming, specifically of the dynamic sort. I know some PHP, but that's about the limit of my knowledge currently. I don't even know what language I should start with, let alone where I should be reading up on whatever language is the best to start with. Any recommendations?

(Grooveshark is a good example of the sort of thing that I'm trying to go for, here)
 
Your probably going to get lots of suggestions for PHP and for sure PHP is a great language if you choose go that route.

So I'm going to go against the grain and offer up an alternative which is Java/JSP. (Full disclosure: I am a Java developer professionally). Using JSP would probably not be as straight forward or easy to get started with as PHP would, but it is a powerful option.

JSP (JavaServer Pages is a language based on Java used for creating Java web applications. In order to use JSP, you need a web server capable of rendering the JSP into something a web browser can understand. A popular choice off the top of my head is Apache Tomcat (the latest version of which can be downloaded here). Tomcat also requires a Java to run which you can get from Oracle/SUN here. You will also need a text editor (I recommend Notepad++ if your using Windows).

Once you have all the pieces you can use online tutorials (such as: JSP Tutorial) to get you started.


In learning JSP, you would also be learning elements of the Java programming language. Anything that can or has been written in Java can be used by JSP in addition.
 
PHP + Ajax is a winning combination. There are tons of tutorials out there, you just have to find the right project to work on. Perhaps you should find some open-source project to contribute to, that way you can build your skills first
 
finalgt said:
It's starting to become professionally desirable for me to jump into programming, specifically of the dynamic sort. I know some PHP, but that's about the limit of my knowledge currently. I don't even know what language I should start with, let alone where I should be reading up on whatever language is the best to start with. Any recommendations?
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Objectively, no language suggested thus far is "best". PHP, ASP.Net, JSP/Java are all good (but not the only) candidates for what you've described. Lots of users in this forum would be able to assist with random questions in these languages as you get your hands dirty.


Evaders99 said:
PHP + Ajax is a winning combination. There are tons of tutorials out there, you just have to find the right project to work on. Perhaps you should find some open-source project to contribute to, that way you can build your skills first
Click to expand...
Proper implementation more determines a "winning combination" than simply concatonating technology. I'd recommend against trying to find some random project to contribute to at first -- if it's a solid and robust project, they might shy against having someone admittedly so green directly working with code trunks or branches. Working through a cookbook in a particular language would be a much better beginning.
 
I would personally echo devman's Java recommendation, though there are certainly other good choices. You can just download Netbeans or Eclipse and hit the ground running with little configuration (be sure to get the "full featured" versions that include the web components).

This is a good resource for Java "web stuff". The guy who runs the site is a pretty well known author of Java books and has several of them online for free in PDF form (he wrote the text for a class I took on this stuff which is how I found the site). "Core Servlets and JSP Vol I" does a good job of explaining the basics.
 
It's not OS, but I personally really enjoy asp.NET. Once you understand UpdatePanels (asp.NET + AJAX), it can be really powerful. The learning curve is pretty quick too. Hell, when I first started I didn't even know I was using AJAX, but I was making fast loading and updating web apps.

But, no matter what you chose to do, you need to be well versed in AJAX. Page redirects and refreshes with every click can be sooo annoying. Plus, AJAX helps you do things like load data when needed so that you aren't just doing everything on your page load (which will slow you down a ton).

I'm probably going to convert over to PHP once I get my hands a little dirtier and I'm comfortable letting go of things like Intellisense. But for now, I love asp.NET!
 
If you don't care about which platform/language you are going to work with then I will just go ahead and recommend anything .Net based. Go to dice.com and search for php, then search for .Net and you will find three times as many job postings for .Net.
 
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