Shamelessly crowdsourcing the availability heuristic: I’m trying to learn web development and have been looking for resources to learn it on my own. My goals are fairly modest; I’d like to make basically static pages and a few forms.
So far I’ve tried HTML/CSS tutorials, which were approachable and fun to play around with offline, but did not offer step by step instructions on how to translate that online. I also tried the Udemy course, which was great on lesson 1, but gratuitously racheted up the complexity on lesson 2 with unexplained Python code.
So, thus far, there’s plenty of materials but they tend to skip some inferential distance when approached by a total noob. Does anyone have recommendations for a lesson plan that can take me all the way there?
This is the gold standard. It will both give you your goals very quickly (rails project-name, cd project-name, rails generate scaffold my-page ... where ... is some arguments to the scaffold generator that you’ll have to look up and tailor to fit my-page) and give you, eventually, formidable knowledge on arguably the best web development platform going.
but did not offer step by step instructions on how to translate that online.
This is tackled by the rails tutorial—in the process of following the tutorial you will actually, step by step, host your website on an external provider and visit it in your browser like everybody else.
Look into web hosting. If you feel a strong need to pay nothing, x10hosting fit the bill several years ago when I felt that way. WebFaction is supposed to be good for Django. Linode could be good if you want to do a lot of difficult system administration first, which will allow you to create far more flexible setups later on. In general, just googling around for hosting opportunities is probably better than listening to me.
This doesn’t answer your question but it is something to keep in mind when doing web development: don’t use w3schools as a reference (explanation), something like the Mozilla Developer Network is much better (or one of these other references).
(In fact, I just noticed: Mozilla seems to provide some tutorials, although they don’t look like they are the sort of tutorials you are looking for.)
If you just want static pages, you can just make them and then upload them to some webhost via FTP. Your ISP may offer a small amount of free webhosting, or there are various free webhosts you can find by searching. You can then use an FTP client (such as WinSCP on windows) to upload the files to the server.
For forms, it depends on exactly what you want to do (just emailing stuff can be done through pure HTML IIRC), but the easiest way would be through PHP—there are many cheap/free PHP hosts and you can just upload the PHP files to the host and have them work without further setup.
Shamelessly crowdsourcing the availability heuristic: I’m trying to learn web development and have been looking for resources to learn it on my own. My goals are fairly modest; I’d like to make basically static pages and a few forms.
So far I’ve tried HTML/CSS tutorials, which were approachable and fun to play around with offline, but did not offer step by step instructions on how to translate that online. I also tried the Udemy course, which was great on lesson 1, but gratuitously racheted up the complexity on lesson 2 with unexplained Python code.
So, thus far, there’s plenty of materials but they tend to skip some inferential distance when approached by a total noob. Does anyone have recommendations for a lesson plan that can take me all the way there?
This is the gold standard. It will both give you your goals very quickly (
rails project-name
,cd project-name
,rails generate scaffold my-page ...
where...
is some arguments to the scaffold generator that you’ll have to look up and tailor to fitmy-page
) and give you, eventually, formidable knowledge on arguably the best web development platform going.This is tackled by the rails tutorial—in the process of following the tutorial you will actually, step by step, host your website on an external provider and visit it in your browser like everybody else.
Look into web hosting. If you feel a strong need to pay nothing, x10hosting fit the bill several years ago when I felt that way. WebFaction is supposed to be good for Django. Linode could be good if you want to do a lot of difficult system administration first, which will allow you to create far more flexible setups later on. In general, just googling around for hosting opportunities is probably better than listening to me.
This doesn’t answer your question but it is something to keep in mind when doing web development: don’t use w3schools as a reference (explanation), something like the Mozilla Developer Network is much better (or one of these other references).
(In fact, I just noticed: Mozilla seems to provide some tutorials, although they don’t look like they are the sort of tutorials you are looking for.)
I like this: http://htmldog.com/
If you just want static pages, you can just make them and then upload them to some webhost via FTP. Your ISP may offer a small amount of free webhosting, or there are various free webhosts you can find by searching. You can then use an FTP client (such as WinSCP on windows) to upload the files to the server.
For forms, it depends on exactly what you want to do (just emailing stuff can be done through pure HTML IIRC), but the easiest way would be through PHP—there are many cheap/free PHP hosts and you can just upload the PHP files to the host and have them work without further setup.