Tips for The Self Taught Web Developer

Most businesses today engage in e-commerce in order to maintain sales at a level high enough to generate profits and/or growth. Web developers are the people to contract when a professional, e-commerce enabled web site is desired. Very small businesses that only offer a few items or services for sale may get by without the often costly services of a web developer. How? Simple "buy now" buttons can easily be incorporated into web sites. These "buttons" allow visitors to purchase one item, a service, a subscription, or even make a donation with a major credit card. This is not a good e-commerce solution for businesses offering a variety of items for sale. Why? Customers wishing to purchase 3 or 4 items would have to go through the checkout process 3 or 4 times. Shopping carts were created through scripting to avoid putting customers through such hassle.

The growth of e-commerce is only one of the reasons why the skills of web developers are very valuable. However, the field is fiercely competitive. Should those who are interested in a career as a web developer go to college and declare such a major? Not necessarily. The best computer programmers used to be self-taught. Although few web developers program in full blown languages such as C or Java unless they code Java server pages, they are, nevertheless, programmers. Interactivity, animation, and artificial intelligence on the Internet is achieved through programs (scripts) written in various languages.

What are some of the languages that web developers use? It might be best to first ask which languages must all "real" web developers know. First, although (X)HTML is not a programming or even a scripting language, it is a mark-up language that every web designer and developer should know. Why? Don't programs like MS FrontPage eliminate the need to know (X)HTML?

It's true that there are a variety of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) programs out there for web page creation. However, there are times when a web master needs to know how to work with the actual code behind a page. There are many good books on how to code in (X)HTML as well as free courses that are abundantly available on the Internet.

CSS (cascading style sheets) should be mastered by web designers and developers who want to focus on front-end development. CSS is the language used to maintain content separate from style. Again, there are a variety of good books, free web courses and tutorials on the subject.

Client-side Javascript is also a must even for front-end development (the visual side of things). It's somewhat deceiving to say that Javascript is easy to learn. It's easy to learn compared to learning languages like C or Java, but remove the comparison and it won't seem quite so easy to some students. One of the very best books teaching Javascript is [removed] Concepts & Techniques - Programming Interactive Web Sites, by Tina Spain McDuffie. She is an excellent writer and teacher. Some things in Javascript have changed since the 2003 edition of the book, but it's better to truly learn the language from an older book rather than grasp only bit and pieces from a new one that isn't well written.

An image editing program should also be learned especially for front-end web development. Adobe's Photoshop is the most popular, but is quite expensive. The GIMP is a totally free image manipulation program that can be used instead of Photoshop.

Back-end web developers must know at least one server side scripting language such as PHP, PERL, or ASP. There are many others. He or she will also have to have a very strong basic understanding of databases. This is only the beginning. Web development, in particular for large data driven commercial web sites entail so much more than the amateur may have thought.