Friday, January 11, 2008

2 down, n - 2 to go

Just finished "Head Rush Ajax." It didn't feel as polished as the HTML book. The final example in the Ajax book doesn't work, but the helpful forums did have the answer. As I mentioned, some of the coding examples are really painful, although I don't yet know if that is because the authors don't want to teach JavaScript or because JavaScript is teh suck. "Learning JavaScript" is next, so I'll let you know then. Question for readers out there: should I do LAMP next -- that is to say, run through "Learning MySQL and PHP" -- or jump straight to Rails? My instinct is to blast through the LAMP book -- despite the reviews that indicate a lot of errata -- since I'd like to understand the server side concepts before hitting all the Rails shortcuts.

7 comments:

TrevorFSmith said...

Though you'll miss a bit of the glory of realizing just how much Rails kicks old stacks' asses, I'd jump straight past LAMP.

That said, django is the bees' knees so once you grok Rails skim over there to see the Python side of the story.

Megan Squire said...

you're working pretty fast; I'd go ahead and do the LAMP stuff, then you get a chance to compare/contrast...making it a fair fight.

Also, I'd work on an actual project while you're reading this stuff. Makes it more "real". (Maybe you already are...?)

Dave Briccetti said...

Is there something about PHP specifically that appeals to you? Its own author says in a podcast episode that it's poorly engineered. You might consider Java, Python, Ruby or even Smalltalk frameworks instead. I agree with trevorfsmith that Django is cool.

cory ondrejka said...

I have to admit to being a bit of a python bigot. Learned perl first and just haven't done enough with python for it to stick.

Yeah, I have three different test projects to play with. Maybe I'll jump to Rails and then backtrack to LAMP, django, etc. JavaScript is kind of fun, so I want to blast through that book first, though.

Gavin said...

Javascript, the language, is fun, high-level, LISP-like in its flexibility, and not the "toy" that folks make it out to be.

Browsers, the usual execution environment, really suck. I try to consider them as I would device hardware, which must be probed for capabilities.

The capabilities are improving, though, and there's the equivalent of "software rendering" too.

Unknown said...

Cory, I second the Django comment. Do LAMP then Django and skip Rails.

Kyle Machulis said...

PHP is worth at least looking over quickly, though there's not a ton to learn about it (other than eccentricities better left to those forced to use them) if you're already familiar with C. PHP seems to have become to web programming what BASIC/FORTRAN is to old engineering textbooks; sure, you may not be using it, but so many people use it as an example language for web stuff that it's worth having familiarity with just so you can quickly port to your chosen platform.

If you get to the point of wanting to glue pieces of frameworks together versus the monolithic structure (after all the language learning is done), I recommend checking out Pylons at some point too. It's what Trac (a development framework gaining popularity) runs on, and I've been working on rebuilding some of my generative web art stuff on it. Is neat.