Archive for December, 2009

Part 3: Debugging Tools for becoming a web programmer

BUGS! They need special care and attention. They need special tools too. This post is dedicated to squashing bugs. (This tutorial is a part of the series – “How to become a web programmer in 4 easy steps”. Read previous post here. )

Nailing bugs can be done with assistance from browsers. We will discuss tools that are available with the three major browsers in the market – IE 8, Firefox 3.5 and Google Chrome 3.0.


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Part 2: Editing tools and Lookup materials for becoming a web programmer

Among the many things that play a crucial role in maintaining the flow of development, the choice of an editor and reference document are undoubtedly the most important. Today we will discuss them.

(This tutorial is a part of the series – “How to become a web programmer in 4 easy steps” . Read previous post here.)

Choice of an Editor

My stints with text editors always ended in disaster until I used Notepad++; and I fell in love with it.

notepad++

Notepad++ is the best text editing software in its category. It boasts of a lot of features including support for a whopping 48 scripting languages and portability.

Reference Material

A reference always comes handy – especially if it is available offline. Free offline materials are hard to find. Given below is a collection of offline and online reference material for HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP.

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Part 1: Essential Development Tools for becoming a web programmer

We will start our discussion by setting up a development environment. (This tutorial is a part of the series – “How to become a web programmer in 4 easy steps”)

For every budding web developer, it is extremely important to get himself/herself familiarised with the basic setup required for client-server architecture. On the client-side only a browser is needed. Since all operating systems come with at least a browser, we can concentrate on setting up the server part of the story.

Here’s what you will need:

  1. A server – most popular being Apache
  2. A programming language – PHP being the most popular among the many available
  3. A database manager – MySQL being the most popular

Besides their popularity, all of them are free to use.

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How to become a web programmer in 4 easy steps

right-tool-selection

Gather the tools and know them

In a nutshell, yes, that’s it – the recipe for starting out to be a web programmer.

It took me a while to figure out, gather and put the ingredients in their right place. A break-up of the tools is given below.

  1. Development
  2. Debugging
  3. Validation and
  4. Optimisation Tools


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