Best book for web coding and developement?

[jtusa]

Trying to get back into website coding and developement, etc. What are some of the better books out there right now?

 

[randumb]

You should probably say what server-side scripting language you want to use.

 

[jtusa]

Originally posted by: randumb
You should probably say what server-side scripting language you want to use.

Therein lies the problem, dunno yet. There anything out there that kind of touches a bit on several of them?

 

[fallenangel99]

i rather look online than spend 40-50 on a book

just my .02 cents. google is great. if you know how to use irc, you can get your e-books there also (pdf format)

 

[jtusa]

Originally posted by: fallenangel99
i rather look online than spend 40-50 on a book

just my .02 cents. google is great. if you know how to use irc, you can get your e-books there also (pdf format)

Maybe I'll do that and just print it off on work. I'd much rather have a printed text in front of me when it comes to books.

 

[mugs]

http://www.php.net if you want to learn PHP. I suspect you probably will as it's extremely popular, and both PHP and MySQL are free so hosting is cheap. PHP.NET has excellent documentation, download the .chm file.

Perl is another free option, but it wasn't designed as a web scripting language like PHP was, so it doesn't handle some things as nicely as PHP does. They have almost identical syntax, and I can't think of any reason why you'd want to use perl rather than PHP. I'm sure there may be, but I don't know any.

If you'd like to do this as a job somewhere down the line, you would benefit from learning ASP and ASP.NET (they're as different as night and day). You'll need Windows-based hosting, which is generally more expensive than linux-based hosting, but you can get a small account with enough room for you to play around with for a couple of bucks a month. Microsoft publishes some good books on their technologies, check them out at Borders to see if they're up you're alley, then buy them on Borders.com or Amazon.com for huge savings.

There's also Coldfusion, I've never used it and I have no idea why someone would choose it over the others. I think it was created by Macromedia, so maybe it integrates well with Dreamweaver? I dunno. It's also not free, not sure about hosting options.

Good luck!

 

[AFB]

Originally posted by: mugs
http://www.php.net if you want to learn PHP. I suspect you probably will as it's extremely popular, and both PHP and MySQL are free so hosting is cheap. PHP.NET has excellent documentation, download the .chm file.

Perl is another free option, but it wasn't designed as a web scripting language like PHP was, so it doesn't handle some things as nicely as PHP does. They have almost identical syntax, and I can't think of any reason why you'd want to use perl rather than PHP. I'm sure there may be, but I don't know any.

If you'd like to do this as a job somewhere down the line, you would benefit from learning ASP and ASP.NET (they're as different as night and day). You'll need Windows-based hosting, which is generally more expensive than linux-based hosting, but you can get a small account with enough room for you to play around with for a couple of bucks a month. Microsoft publishes some good books on their technologies, check them out at Borders to see if they're up you're alley, then buy them on Borders.com or Amazon.com for huge savings.

There's also Coldfusion, I've never used it and I have no idea why someone would choose it over the others. I think it was created by Macromedia, so maybe it integrates well with Dreamweaver? I dunno. It's also not free, not sure about hosting options.

Good luck!

I think I am starting to agree more and more with mugs :shocked: .

 

[MrChad]

Originally posted by: mugs
There's also Coldfusion, I've never used it and I have no idea why someone would choose it over the others. I think it was created by Macromedia, so maybe it integrates well with Dreamweaver? I dunno. It's also not free, not sure about hosting options.

Good suggestions.

ColdFusion was originally developed by Allaire, who was later bought out by Macromedia. Like PHP, it's a cross-platform server-side language, but unlike PHP, it's not free and the server software licenses can cost quite a bit. It's easy to learn (it's tag-based like HTML) and extremely well-suited for developing database-driven web applications quickly. When it was first introduced, it was one of the strongest web application languages available. It's popularity has faded recently, mostly due to cost. Macromedia has also turned the language into a JSP wrapper of sorts (the server core is now Java-based), and has made server administration more complex and difficult.