Coding

Ahso! · Post by **Ahso!** » Tue Nov 02, 2010 6:33 pm

My daughter and her fiancée are beginning a web design business and since she learned that I've recently lost a second long term client, they've offered me a job. The only problem is I have to learn how to code html, html5, java, c and c+. My daughter is currently attending college to learn coding herself. I gave this a half hearted attempt about 4 or 5 years ago and gave up because its a tedious undertaking, but I want to help my daughter and engage her, and, quite frankly, I could use the income.

So who can help me learn?

Post by **spot** » Tue Nov 02, 2010 6:55 pm

That's a very strange combination of languages. Is it deliberately chosen or is it guesswork? If it's deliberate, do you know why they've been chosen? And are you sure it's java and not javascript?

Do you have a deadline?

Ahso! · Post by **Ahso!** » Tue Nov 02, 2010 7:57 pm

Javascript. I'm not sure why they told me all of them but I can get more specific info tomorrow. I don't think there is a deadline yet, but they have something in the way of a contract pending.

Post by **spot** » Tue Nov 02, 2010 8:02 pm

Here's a suggestion. Don't write, manage. Register at Outsource to Freelancers, IT Companies, Programmers, Web Designers from India, Russia, USA, and more and build a team already capable of each component you're commissioned to develop. You'll be adding value, the freelancers are comparatively cheap and you'll get it built quickly and effectively - I reckon you'd quite likely be worth paying to fill that seat. I've done some development that way and it's very effective.

Ahso! · Post by **Ahso!** » Tue Nov 02, 2010 8:05 pm

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll look into it. Thats more up my alley.

Ahso! · Post by **Ahso!** » Tue Nov 02, 2010 8:11 pm

That looks like a great idea.

yaaarrrgg · Post by **yaaarrrgg** » Tue Nov 02, 2010 9:45 pm

c and c++ are a bit tricky, but you probably won't need them for the web. That's more for writing device drivers and desktop apps. You can get more performance out of the lower level languages (because you have more control).

HTML and Javascript (for client side programming) and PHP (for server side programming) are some places to start. PHP is nice for smaller projects, although anything large might require Java or .Net.

Here's a quick overview of HTML. It's not really a language, but more like a template syntax. The main concept is "Tags" and they come in pairs like:

<tag> starts the block code

</tag> ends the block of code

You can think of the / as the "off" flag. And the characters surround a word to show it's a tag.

Sometimes you'll two tags will be combined into one like:

<tag /> (notice the tag contains an off / at the end)

This is just the lazy way of writing:

<tag></tag>

Then the tags can contain attributes inside of them:

<tag attribute="1" />

This is another way to pack more information. Like the switches in a command line argument.

Then the only other thing is that the tags have to be closed in the same order they are nested in. For example a structure like:

<html>

</html>

can contain:

<html>

<body>

this is a simple page

</body>

</html>

You can also visualize the nesting of tags as a tree (parent/child relationships). For example the parent of is

This page, if you copied and pasted into file and viewed in a browser would show the text in the body.

Now, with the special characters like , these have to be "escaped" if you want to display them in text or attributes:

< becomes <

> becomes >

...

Not that these have to be memorized...what's important is just knowing something like &CODE; will render as a character in the browser.

That's HTML in a nutshell.

HTML 5 is a new standard.. I'll have to look at that a bit more to give an overview. Though XML and a lot of the template languages (like in .Net and Java) follow basically the same syntax rules.

yaaarrrgg · Post by **yaaarrrgg** » Tue Nov 02, 2010 9:57 pm

spot;1342173 wrote: Here's a suggestion. Don't write, manage. Register at Outsource to Freelancers, IT Companies, Programmers, Web Designers from India, Russia, USA, and more and build a team already capable of each component you're commissioned to develop. You'll be adding value, the freelancers are comparatively cheap and you'll get it built quickly and effectively - I reckon you'd quite likely be worth paying to fill that seat. I've done some development that way and it's very effective.

That is a good idea.. I would still recommend getting a broad feel of the technologies too. Not in any tedious detail, but enough to make quick typo fixes and changes to a project.

CARLA · Post by **CARLA** » Wed Nov 03, 2010 7:09 am

Spots idea is more efficient and less time consuming in the long haul and time is money in this instance good luck.