Time to learn more?

[ShadyCoco]

Well...

Today I turned 19 and I looked at what I know and I'm thinking I need to know more.

So any sujestions on what I should learn? (Web development languages only please/ or mark up)

Thanks

[bluegman991]

Well what do you know so far?

[ShadyCoco]

PHP/CSS/html

[Ishraq]

Try Jquery/Ajax.

[ShadyCoco]

Anymore?

.msg2short

[Neon]

Those in itself are very broad and good enough for starters. Once you can comfortably edit jQuery plugins to your liking, start making your own. Its really amazing the powerful-ness you can do with it. Yes, you can use AJAX with jQuery.

[a_bertrand]

Well you didn't said what are your goals. You should first have a goal and then try to fulfill it. For example, if you say that you want to work in some industry / company, then you should look what they are using normally and try to learn what you don't know for it. Or... if you want to create some sort of product / service, then try to implement it. Just thinking of learning for the shake of learning, sorry for me it seems dull.

[a_bertrand]

That's pure blabla, if you have just knowledge without any real application of it, it's as good as nothing. Also learning without a goal is as well much more difficult specially in the computing science. For example, you may read all the books of a given language, and watch tons of videos, but if you don't try by yourself you will never really understand it nor master it. And to test, the best thing is something to apply it to.

Some how this is the kind of thinking I find again and again here, instead of starting with a clear goal it's more "let's make a game" without having a clear picture of what kind, what set of features, story etc... Sorry it is CLEAR that it doesn't work, the many example of failure we have here are a clear demonstration. Well it's not different from the learning, you may start buying a book, but till you really apply it to something concrete you will not learn. It's like trying to master oil painting without ever touching to the paint / canvas.

[ShadyCoco]

Hey A_bertrand.

Well I was thinking of making a top down mmorpg.

But I don't know wehter to have it browser based or client based.

I'm going more towards BB mmorpg because people don't like waiting for downloads :P

[a_bertrand]

HTML / JS will hardly make it good. I know by experience how much work it is. I would suggest then to check Java / Applet, Flash or Silverlight if you want to make it still in the browser but not just with HTML / JS.

For a client based code, you still have Java, C#, VB.NET or others to develop

The 2 roads are quiet different

[ShadyCoco]

What way would be the best?

Client or BB?

In the past I've had a poll done on 2 forums and all gamers say BB games are always better for poeple with low DL speed.

[Nickson]

It all really depends on what you are trying to do. You have many different solutions for one simple question.

What should you learn extra..? Well what direction do you want to go to? First of all, get a good grip on what you know, like knowing the ins and out, and more than just the basics and how those language integrate with each other. Once you've mastered this, I'd suggest moving on, but I've made the wrong choice of using too many language at the same time. Education said these group, while I wanted to learn another group, ... it can confuse you, and in the end the learning curve is much longer and you won't get to know as much as you would learn them one by one. Of course, you get a good overview over all of them, what you miss, and what you can carry over, ... but it certainly makes it harder until you reach that point where you understand it all.

The choice between client based, or browser based is again, a question that can't be answered with a simple line. Browser based might indeed be faster for people with a slow connection, but it really depends on how you create it. For instance, you could make a client based game, and make them store all graphics and else on their computer. They don't need to be loaded each time from the web.. Will it be faster or slower? While they might get a better game experience than with the traditional text based game, does that one second that it takes extra to transfer their data to the server matter? I find it hard to just give you a simple answer without knowing more.

If you're willing to go corporate, Java & C#.NET might be a good choice, if you want to look into linux systems and applications, well then C or Python might be more of the #1 choices. Do you want to stay on the webworld, then aspx.net aside php might be a good call, or even java or python as they can be used as well?

[ShadyCoco]

Thanks nick

I've decided to learn more about PHP and mysql(i).

Anyone have any good ideas for learning OO PHP?

[ShadyCoco]

Well.

In a word no.

But like everything else. I learn from pratice/doing more than reading.

[a_bertrand]

ShadyCoco: PHP is not the right language to learn / experiement with OO. It's OO implementation is somewhat... odd let say and actually you will not really see the advantages of OO in PHP in most cases.

[bluegman991]

I disagree I think php is a good language to learn OO php in first, especially when you already know how to use the language. It doesn't put everything on you at once that a fully oop language would. And as soon as you learned all of the OO aspects of php you can move onto java, visual basic, etc...

After learning OO php moving to java and visual basic was a breeze for me.

[Spudinski]

I lol'd. PHP OOP is horrible, I wouldn't suggest it for a starting guide.

OOP in PHP was designed to keep large projects flexable, and re-useable.

Since 90% of all ever created projects with PHP is small apps, it's vurtially useless in context.

PHP's main let downs is the fact that everything is so "easy" to do with it, libraries for everything, no memory management, no definitions, etc.

Back to OP:

I'd suggest you actually learn how things work together before going further, because it will help a lot in time to come(trust me). When you know how the underlying priciples of the system actually work, it will be much easier to create programs and learn(or even create) new ways to perform certain tasks.

Let's take PHP, there's three main parts to PHP(web dev), namely: The core, libs and the gateway, being apache or w/e.

The core is often overlooked, because it doesn't really do anything other than provide a method for libraries to be used. The gateway, being p.e. apache, is a seperate process on the system, that simply calls on PHP.

OOP will be an addition to the core, and mysql will be a lib.

Now onto other things...

Since you will program PHP for 90% Unix variants, it would be wise to know how *nix actually works.

Things like the kernel, boot process, memory/swap management, administration and networking internals would be a good place to start. If you know the underlying principles of the system, then you can addapt what you know to ANY other programming language, because they are no more than a simple shell script to you then, just with different names for functions(which could be reffered to as processes, eg. /bin/*).

The basic theory is that you will never know the inn's and out's of every programming language, but you will eventually know how they work with the system to create the disired output.

So for a conclusion then:

If you don't know how memory works, learn that.

If you don't know how disks work, learn that.

If you don't know how the kernel(initialization) works, learn that.

If you don't know how booting of a system works, learn that.

It can actually be summed up by the OSI model, learn from bottom layers, to top. Just re-represent them with components of the computer.

Here's a nice figure..

[bluegman991]

That's exactly why I would suggest learning the basics of OO PHP before a fully OO language that you don't even know. OO programming is a lot different than php so i'm just saying, it was easier for me to dive in feet first rather than head first. So it may or may not be easier for you to.

[a_bertrand]

I would say it all depends what are your goals. Learn OO? Then study the reasons and advantage of it, and apply them. For that PHP is not good as it doesn't offer the true vision of OO in my opinion. If your goal is to jump on Java or C#, then PHP doesn't help you at all, as both language (Java and C#) have a completely different approach of how a program should / must be implemented. Therefore jump directly to those instead of trying to grab some pseudo-knowledge with PHP. A language today is hardly just a syntax but more certainly a whole framework and a way of thinking. For example in C# you normally works via events, something which doesn't exists in PHP.

That doesn't mean PHP is all bad. I still believe PHP do offer some advantages in the sense of quick trials of small things, without the requirement of a compiler a full IDE or whatever. It offers also (normally) a more OS agnostic approach, and by that I mean, normally you don't care much about the OS in PHP. Also, PHP is really a jump forward compared to C CGI (which a doubt many of you ever tried as this was the first method to create dynamic web sites long time ago).

Is PHP good for all? Certainly not, and it's also clear that in corporate environment PHP is hardly used. Why? Because it's much harder to maintain big sites written in PHP than in Java or C#, performances are worse than the other and development time tend to be... longer in the long run.

Shall you jump on something else now? No. If you know PHP and your problem can be solved by PHP, then go for it. Learning a language could take maybe a week or even less to make your first trials, but to really start mastering it and getting advantages of the different platform, it will take you 8-24 months. That is also a reason why I personally try to avoid to jump from one language to the other. If the one I use do what I need, I stick with it.

[Spudinski]

Is PHP good for all? Certainly not, and it's also clear that in corporate environment PHP is hardly used. Why? Because it's much harder to maintain big sites written in PHP than in Java or C#, performances are worse than the other and development time tend to be... longer in the long run.

Now that's not true.

PHP is used widely, and in some areas more than the C#/ASP.NET combination.

PHP is easy to maintain if the application was created in a half decent way, and can easily be upgraded if you make it modular - hence the reason most opensource apps are modular.

I've even seen PHP being used in system administration, or as a complete application on some *nix systems. I've got several PHP scripts doing various things on my system, because a) I know it well, and b) it's does the job swiftly.

I wouldn't be suprised if large corporations use PHP for sysadmin tasks as well, even though not as likely as you would see Perl or shell scripts, but then again you have to remember that even Ruby has seen an increasing development on *nix systems.

But I do agree with the rest of your post....

[a_bertrand]

Well I came to this simply by checking how many job offer you get for C# or Java compared to PHP... Shows clearly that PHP is not as widely requested. Now I don't say nobody use PHP, nor I do say that PHP code is always a mess, of course it depends primarely how you write your code. But for sure PHP is harder to make clean than a C# or Java code. It's due to the frameworks under and tons of different reasons, but believe me, till you work on big projects once with PHP once with other language, you will not see the difference. And yes I do know PHP very well ;)

[bluegman991]

One of the reasons of that is probably because more people know about java/c++ than php. Where I'm at Both C++ and Java are taught in high school. On top of that pretty much anyone who has the internet has java on their computer and they realize it every time a java app starts or anytime they update java. Then C++ is like a language that every one knows about, they may not even know what it does but they've heard about it.

On a separate note when you were looking up those job offers did where you looking up java, java applet, or java servlets. If you only look up java then search engines are probably going to give you results for all 3. So of course all 3 are going to be more than php. Plus java applets and java programs are nothing similar considering they are both only ran on the clients side. So JSP(Java Server Pages) is what you should probably be looking for when comparing java to php.

As for C# I have never looked into using it for a Web program. So I wouldn't know what difference there is between application and server usage.

I think maybe if you search more specifically you might get different results.

[a_bertrand]

I searched quiet a lot, and can tell you my results are nothing odd. But if you don't trust them, please make your own research and share your results. Also, Java applets are nearly not used, where you should look for JSP & servlet mainly for Java. J2EE & JBoss are other keywords you may look for.

But again, it doesn't mean you guys should stop using PHP, I was merely pointing out why I choose to move away from it and for my personal feeling / findings, C# is about 10x as faster to develop & maintain as PHP.

[Spudinski]

One of the reasons of that is probably because more people know about java/c++ than php.

Not just that really.

Corporate wants support on-demand, Java has that. With PHP you'll have to tell your boss, "Just hang on, I've posted the problem on a online forum".

Companies are willing to pay for the support, thus the reason they lean towards vendor products.

[dxball]

jQuery/php/Css/html

if you know these all you are hitting.

jQuery is remarkable.. try it.