my name is Tabetha and I have a question…
I am a web designer, but I always find that while designing the layout and coding the design I come up with great ideas for websites. I would like to know where I need to start in order to learn back-end programming not only for the knowledge, but also for the challenge of it.
I have searched online but can’t seem to find the information I am looking for. If anyone can give me a simple, straight-forward “this is what language you need to learn” answer, or perhaps guide me in the right direction I would appreciate it ten-fold.
I am a complete noob when it comes to this, so even the most basic information is probably a pearl of wisdom for me. 🙂
my name is Tabetha and I have a question… I am a web designer,
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With this type of question you will never one simple, straight-forward answer 🙂 Are you a Mac person? If so, you’ll probably want to learn PHP or Ruby on Rails for server-side programming, along with MySQL for your database. These technologies are widely used on other operating systems, including Windows. The Apache web server and PHP is included in Mac OS X; Rails is easy to set up. Most hosting providers will offer cheap LAMP hosting packages (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) (Google “LAMP tutorial”)
If you’re a PC person, you might want to learn about .NET (VB or C#), SQL Server and IIS. There are many similarities in the development practices between the different technologies, with MVC being the recommended design pattern. Understanding MVC is important.
There are many other “back-end” technologies, including JAVA, ColdFusion, etc, but PHP/MySQL is the most common.
You could also learn about server-side content management systems, like Drupal, WordPress or Joomla to name a few. These systems take care of much of the low level data handling, leaving you to focus more on the content and appearance, while sacrificing some flexibility.
Good luck!