Books to learn

[Ash]

Hi guys. Basically I'm copy and paste what I currently have on my homepage, in hope that you lot can maybe suggest some books that'll aid me in my goals.

It's difficult to explain what this place is, or how I'm going to achieve what I'm about to explain, but as the quote above from Walt Disney suggests, everything is possible. For the past 3 months I've been lazy, expecting money to fall on my lap but the less involved I get with, life, the more I realise I need to make a living for myself, and why not make that living off something I enjoy more than anything? Graphic Design & The Internet. 2&2= Web Design.

Admittedly, my graphic design is far more superior than my knowledge of coding. In fact, I hardly have any but there's only one way to recitfy that. And that's to make use of all the free knoweldge I'm accessable through the University Library. What you see on this page is a result of between 3-4 hours of reading "The Complete Reference, HTML & XHTML" by Thomas A. Powell.

I won't set about making false promises, but in time I do expect to be literate in;
HTML & XHTML
JavaScript
PHP & MySQL

Any help would be appreciated

[Jordan]

I never bought any books for web based languages so I can't recommend any books, but I can give you some advice.

When it comes to getting a book, I recommend you read reviews about several of them on a website such as Amazon.com to see what people have to say. I would think any HTML book would do since it's a fairly simple markup language and there isn't any programming logic. However, I also recommend you look at the source code of websites (that's how I learned). In your browser, do File -> Save Page As, save it to your hard drive, and start modifying the page to see how things work. Try to notice all the details and really comprehend what is going on. I also recommend you use FireFox and download some useful addons like WebDeveloper and FireBug. WebDeveloper lets you do cool things like dynamically change the CSS of a page so you don't have to keep changing everything by hand (this speeds things up tremendously). FireBug is great for debugging code, especially Javascript, and finding the source of a problem. If you are going to be serious about web development, you will definitely want both of these addons.

Learning Javascript will be much more challenging than HTML, especially if you want to really learn it. There are a lot of people who write Javascript codes, but don't really "know" it which is very noticeable in their code (like in all of my older codes on here). It's best to start simple, and learn how to debug early (which is where FireBug comes in). Learning how to set break points, and following the code line by line so you can see what each line does. I would recommend getting a book for Javascript since it's a fully fledged scripting language with lots of features.

As for php/mysql, a book wouldn't hurt here either, but there is some great documentation on the official php website. Just start simple and don't do anything too big or complex. One of my first php projects was a basic shoutbox. Nothing fancy. I wouldn't recommend you learn php/mysql at the same time as everything else, try to get comfortable with XHTML/CSS/Javasript first.

Anyway, feel free to send me a private message if you ever have any questions and good luck.

[Ash]

I've just finished work mate and had a pretty horrendous shift so I'll save a more detailed reply until tomorrow, but I'd just like to thank you for taking your time to help, it's very much appreciated.