Paul McFedries - Web Coding & Development All-in-One For Dummies

Web Coding & Development All-in-One For Dummies

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Copyright 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018935649

ISBN: 978-1-119-47392-3; ISBN: 978-1-119-47383-1 (ePDF); ISBN: 978-1-119-47379-4 (ePub)

When the web first came to the attention of the worlds non-geeks back in the mid-1990s, the vastness and variety of its treasures were a wonder to behold. However, it didnt take long before a few courageous and intrepid souls dug a little deeper into this phenomenon and discovered something truly phenomenal: They could make web pages, too!

Why was that so amazing? Well, think back to those old days and think, in particular, of what it meant to create what we now call content. Think about television shows, radio programs, magazines, newspapers, books, and the other media of the time. The one thing they all had in common was that their creation was a decidedly uncommon thing. It required a team of professionals, a massive distribution system, and a lot of money. In short, it wasnt something that your average Okie from Muskogee would have any hope of duplicating.

The web appeared to change all of that because learning HTML was within the grasp of anybody who could feed himself, it had a built-in massive distribution system (the Internet, natch), and it required little or no money. For the first time in history, content was democratized and was no longer defined as the sole province of governments and mega-corporations.

Then reality set in.

People soon realized that merely building a website wasnt enough to attract eyeballs, as the marketers say. A site had to have interesting, useful, or fun content, or people would stay away in droves. Not only that, but this good content had to be combined with a solid site design, which meant that web designers needed a thorough knowledge of HTML and CSS.

But, alas, eventually even all of that was not enough. To make their websites dynamic and interesting, to make their sites easy to navigate, and to give their sites those extra bells and whistles that surfers had come to expect, something more than content, HTML, and CSS was needed.

That missing link was code.

What weve all learned the hard way over the past few years is that you simply cant put together a world-class website unless you have some coding prowess in your site design toolkit. You need to know how to program your way out of the basic problems that afflict most sites; how to use scripting to go beyond the inherent limitations of HTML and CSS; and how to use code to send and receive data from a web server. And it isnt enough just to copy the generic scripts that are available on the web and paste them into your pages. First of all, most of those scripts are very poorly written, and second of all, they invariably need some customization to work properly on your site.

My goal in this book is to give you a complete education on web coding and development. You learn how to set up the tools you need, how to use HTML and CSS to design and build your site, how to use JavaScript and jQuery to program your pages, and how to use PHP and MySQL to program your web server. My aim is to show you that these technologies arent hard to learn, and that even the greenest rookie programmers can learn how to put together web pages that will amaze their family and friends (and themselves).

If youre looking for lots of programming history, computer science theory, and long-winded explanations of concepts, Im sorry but you wont find it here. My philosophy throughout this book comes from Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux operating system: Talk is cheap. Show me the code. I explain what needs to be explained and then I move on without further ado (or, most of the time, without any ado at all) to examples and scripts that do more to illuminate a concept that any verbose explanations I could muster (and believe me, I can muster verbosity with the best of them).