If I’m looking to learn programming for the purposes of setting up a website, am I better starting with general programming practice or website specific stuff?
There are a lot of quicker ways to set up a website -a lot of hosting solutions come with one sort of web designer, or another; you can be up&running with a general blogger account in 2 minutes. If you have a specific end-goal (eg. moving inventory) in mind, this’ll give you disproportionally quicker bang for your time.
Depending on what your goals are, the primary challenges of websites might not be the technical details, but rather clear communication & value presentation. If you have a goal, articulate it in writing first.
With that said...
Knowing HTML allows you to create static websites; CSS gives you fine-grained control over presentation; Javascript (and specifically, JQuery) allows you to create client-side (in-browser) interactions. You can get through these without the understanding of CS basics (for JS specifically, there are a lot of online collections for scripts, etc)
Web-specific domain languages (php, python, ruby) gives you server-side capabilities (storing & querying data, generating dynamic pages, business logic). More assembly required, and this needs some CS fundamentals.
In short: it depends on whether you see this website&programming as an instrumental goal towards something larger, or as a terminal goal towards “being a better website creator”. Hope this makes sense.
A simple website could be done in an afternoon by someone who already knows the right tools if the website only needs the most standard functionality (what exactly that is depends on the tool), and a free design is acceptable.
Even for someone who wants a website and wants to learn programming, the optimal way is to pay someone else to do the website, then ignore the whole website-making stuff, and focus on programming in general for a few months or years.
If I’m looking to learn programming for the purposes of setting up a website, am I better starting with general programming practice or website specific stuff?
In ascending order of resolution:
There are a lot of quicker ways to set up a website -a lot of hosting solutions come with one sort of web designer, or another; you can be up&running with a general blogger account in 2 minutes. If you have a specific end-goal (eg. moving inventory) in mind, this’ll give you disproportionally quicker bang for your time.
Depending on what your goals are, the primary challenges of websites might not be the technical details, but rather clear communication & value presentation. If you have a goal, articulate it in writing first.
With that said...
Knowing HTML allows you to create static websites; CSS gives you fine-grained control over presentation; Javascript (and specifically, JQuery) allows you to create client-side (in-browser) interactions. You can get through these without the understanding of CS basics (for JS specifically, there are a lot of online collections for scripts, etc)
Web-specific domain languages (php, python, ruby) gives you server-side capabilities (storing & querying data, generating dynamic pages, business logic). More assembly required, and this needs some CS fundamentals.
In short: it depends on whether you see this website&programming as an instrumental goal towards something larger, or as a terminal goal towards “being a better website creator”. Hope this makes sense.
Learning programming takes years.
A simple website could be done in an afternoon by someone who already knows the right tools if the website only needs the most standard functionality (what exactly that is depends on the tool), and a free design is acceptable.
Even for someone who wants a website and wants to learn programming, the optimal way is to pay someone else to do the website, then ignore the whole website-making stuff, and focus on programming in general for a few months or years.
* On average, for the average population.
On the other hand, the better you are, the more things you learn just because they are easy enough to learn to be worth your time.
Depends what kind of website.
Read Learn Python the Hard way. It teaches python, plus has a big extended example for buildign a website.