Webmaster course (1 Viewer)

[cyclotron]

Can anyone here recommend a worthwhile webmaster course to be taken in the evenings ? Not sure what's out there at the minute...if you have any recommenddations, please put 'em here, chozz.

 

[frona]

I did this one through FÁS:
http://www.ciwcertified.com/
I found it good. You do an introduction course then you specialise in one of three um, specialisations which I can't remember now.

Ahh, FÁS and its soggy toast and mystery soup...

 

[RSJ]

http://www.nightcourses.com/search.html?query=web&timescale=night&delivery=all&county=1&B4=Submit

The education boards on boards.ie are pretty good for this kinda info.

 

[cyclotron]

Thanks for all that - I was thinking of doing the IACT one -

http://www.iact.ie/iopen24/product_info.php?products_id=4

Tougher, but seems like the most worthwhile maybe.

 

[flashback]

Thanks for all that - I was thinking of doing the IACT one -

http://www.iact.ie/iopen24/product_info.php?products_id=4

Tougher, but seems like the most worthwhile maybe.

That looks like more of a Web developer course than a Webmaster course.

Actually, what is a Webmaster? Is it the person who looks after the server and things? Or the person who writes content... or both?

It might be worthwhile finding a course that teaches you how to secure Windows server machines, and run IIS, and also how to run a Linux server and run Apache as well as the stuff on the course above there.

Maybe also get introduced to a language, I dunno, php is alright, Python maybe, or Ruby even. I would say Perl, but Perl is insane, and I am still learning it 4 years after starting to learn it, having been a coder for a few years before that. Perl is more or less the definition of too much rope.

If you could do all that stuff, then you would be useful.

 

[cyclotron]

Actually, what is a Webmaster? Is it the person who looks after the server and things? Or the person who writes content... or both?

It can be both, can't it ?

Maybe also get introduced to a language, I dunno, php is alright, Python maybe, or Ruby even. I would say Perl, but Perl is insane, and I am still learning it 4 years after starting to learn it, having been a coder for a few years before that. Perl is more or less the definition of too much rope.

Isn't PERL "the swiss-army knife" of web-scripting ? I have coded in the past as well but only GUI front-end C-based stuff, not PERL. Was hoping that the principles might be easy to pick up. I haven't done any server-side coding at all though so it's a whole new bag. If it's object-oriented, it might be hard to get to grips with.

 

[mr pharmacist!!!!1]

 

[flashback]

Isn't PERL "the swiss-army knife" of web-scripting ? I have coded in the past as well but only GUI front-end C-based stuff, not PERL. Was hoping that the principles might be easy to pick up. I haven't done any server-side coding at all though so it's a whole new bag. If it's object-oriented, it might be hard to get to grips with.

So... yeah, I have been more or less coding exclusively with Perl for slightly more than 4 years now... and it's a complicated language. I'm not that slow, although I might not have that much aptitude towards programming, this is possible, but I think that it's one of the more complicated langs out there.

Initially it seems perfectly simple, like pretty much any language. Then you realise that it is a little odd. And when you are working out how that little odd bit works, you see some more weirdness, and then you are up to your neck in it. Then you start getting into regular expressions. I dunno. It's a bit hardcore.
If you can devote a lot of time to learning something, ok, have a look at perl. If you want to get a clean reasonable job done, there are alternatives.

Having said all that, I still code perl, all day, every day. And, I am still getting better. This didn't happen with Java, with Java I learnt it, and that was it, with C I learnt it, and then it was logic. With perl... you never stop learning the bloody thing.

oh yeah,

use strict;
use warnings;


Always.

 

[Bladez]

It can be both, can't it ?



Isn't PERL "the swiss-army knife" of web-scripting ? I have coded in the past as well but only GUI front-end C-based stuff, not PERL. Was hoping that the principles might be easy to pick up. I haven't done any server-side coding at all though so it's a whole new bag. If it's object-oriented, it might be hard to get to grips with.

If you have programmed GUIs in C then this web stuff should come easy to you. I'd say try reading up on it yourself. For a web server I'd say to use Apache. Its the most popular web server out there. Try installing it on your computer and play around with the configuration options.

For a server side scripting language, I'd say go with PHP. The language is simple to learn and is used for anything from 'my first home page' to huge, multi-million user web applications. So the skills you learn with PHP will tide you well for any web development you find yourself doing in the future. There is an Irish PHP users group that meets in the Longstone pub the last Wednesday of every month http://www.php.ie/. Never been myself, but they seem to really encourage beginners to come along.

 

[flashback]

So... since i am such a sad bastard, I have been thinking about this for ages.
What is the best lang for a web developer to learn...

Perl is extremely powerful. It's not a swiss army knife, it's more of... I dunno, a swiss army. Through Perl you can do almost anything.
But, it can get really messy, unless you are really good.
At the moment I am leaning towards something like Python or Ruby. In fact, I think Ruby might be a great language.

Back to Perl. its annoying, I suppose the reason it is so powerful is the reason it is so dangerous. I just use it to do everything, shell scripting, programming web apps, data mining... but it can and will get you into trouble.
I pretty sure I dont recommend it to a person starting out in this stuff, but seen as you have been working with C you probably have an idea about the right way to do things.
Perl just gives you an enormous number of bad ways to do things, that's the issue. But, it also gives you some amazingly quick and clever ways of doing almost everything too.

 

[Bladez]

So... since i am such a sad bastard, I have been thinking about this for ages.
What is the best lang for a web developer to learn...

Perl is extremely powerful. It's not a swiss army knife, it's more of... I dunno, a swiss army. Through Perl you can do almost anything.
But, it can get really messy, unless you are really good.
At the moment I am leaning towards something like Python or Ruby. In fact, I think Ruby might be a great language.

Back to Perl. its annoying, I suppose the reason it is so powerful is the reason it is so dangerous. I just use it to do everything, shell scripting, programming web apps, data mining... but it can and will get you into trouble.
I pretty sure I dont recommend it to a person starting out in this stuff, but seen as you have been working with C you probably have an idea about the right way to do things.
Perl just gives you an enormous number of bad ways to do things, that's the issue. But, it also gives you some amazingly quick and clever ways of doing almost everything too.

I've only ever used Perl in college for quick and dirty tasks - usually for pulling text from files using regular expressions. I've never used it for web applications so I can't really comment.

I've tried Ruby. Ruby is great for developing web applications fast. The framework abstracts you away from certain tedious implementation details. But with that abstraction you lose a certain level of flexibility, too much flexibility for my liking.

I use PHP and my own very, very light framework - a small set of reusable classes for authentication, input validation etc. I try to adhere to the MVC pattern. I use PDO for interfacing with the database and use Smarty for my views. I find that I'm most productive this way.

There are also ASP.NET and JSP but with them I find that the amount of time I spend researching/understanding/battling with the framework, I could have written the code already in PHP.

Its really a matter of personal preference.