Rob.
Listen to me.
You aren't funny.
You.
Aren't.
Funny.
GTFO.
I am the new developer for newgrounds.
Age 45, Male
Web Developer
Philadelphia
Joined on 3/15/08
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Thanks for this advice.
ur gay faggot
oh cool
Ahhh you got your own level icon now, you've probably had it for ages but i've just not checked.
Spelt is a type of wheat.
I'll have to remember that :)
First comment of 2009!
You fucked up the forums
Congratulations!
As someone who is a professional web developer without a formal CS education, I'd like to add the following:
1) Learn both PHP and Ruby. Also learn any other languages you can. Actually, if you can, learn PHP later. It will be more work in the beginning, but you will avoid having to unlearn a lot of bad habits that php can encourage.
2) Learn Javascript properly. Javascript only looks like other OO languages. There are a lof of differences under the hood, and understanding them makes the difference between having your javascript crash with seemingly strange errors and being able to apply some truly powerful programming techniques.
3) Learn Object Oriented programming. Learn design patterns, and learn SOLID (its an acronym) design methodologies. <a href="<a href="http://www.oodesign.com/design-principles.html">http://www.oodesign.com/design-princi ples.html</a>"><a href="http://www.oodesign.com/design-principles.html">http://www.oodesign.com/design-princi ples.html</a></a>
4) Right after you learn how to code, learn security. In fact, learn it before you learn about proper design.
5) Rob is right. PHP attracts a lot of incompetents. I've seen a lot of PHP code that was written by "professionals" that was both completely insecure and an unmaintainable mess. The saddest part is that in some cases, it actually took intelligence and creativity to screw the code up that badly. See tips 3 and 4 to avoid becoming a statistic.
6) On Computer Science, I have to say I'm ambivalent about this. If you want a corporate job, you'll have a very difficult time getting your foot in the door without a CS or related degree (or ASP.net, and there is an open source implementation for Apache called mod_mono).
More importantly, though, while much of newgrounds and what most sites do does not directly use CS skills, I'm going to say that many of those skills are important none the less, and they are going to become increasingly more relevant as time goes on.
First of all, understanding those basic principles will give you a better understanding of the language you are using. For example, if you know about memory management, you'll undestand why PHP can't properly handle circular references (hint: reference counting). You'll also have a better understanding of how common languages constructs are utilized and how to better use them.
Second, you can find a good many tools to do a lot of tasks, but at some point you are going to run into a wall where either a tool won't be available in your language, or it won't fit your project. At this point, you will need skills like the ability to write parsers and the knowledge of how to properly store that data in memory.
Third, as web applications push more work over to the client, algorithmic efficiency, memory usage, and understanding issues like concurrency are going to become increasingly important. In fact, having a good understanding of concurrency is key to properly writing anything but basic CRUD apps. I just had write an application that could manage a playlist of multipart videos that had to be displayed in the order of their parts. Without understanding concurrency issues, I would not have been able to able to write code that would prevent one admin from screwing up the order in the database. (Mysql transactions were not up to the task. Actually the client should have used a Flash Media server to handle the videos, but he wouldn't listen).
Last, and most importantly, there are a lot of data analysis techniques that will likely be the future of web development. A lot of what is being done by larger companies involves statistical analysis and narrow AI techniques. Amazon's product suggestions are one example of this.
On the other hand, you don't need to a college degree to learn these concepts. There are a lot of good, free resources on the internet to learn these concepts. I've been teaching myself a lot of what I've mentioned above from the internet.
7) Learn a version control system. Version control is like an undo function for saved files. You save your projects to a version control system, and if you screw up, you will be able to roll back to a prior saved copy. SVN and GIT are two popular choices.
8) Related to #6. Never stop learning. This is an industry that is constantly changing. Many skills that were critical 10 years ago are worthless now.
CSS still has trouble aligning properly on all browsers. Tables seem to be better for grid-like design, but they're frowned upon for some reason. Tables are great. I just think the actual styling should be done with CSS.
I just hope web development becomes a little more uniform, more standardized as the years go by. I get sick of worrying about a webpage not working properly in IE or Firefox plug-ins blocking vital content. (People actually complain that the site looks bad when it loads. This is because they have Flashblock installed... or Adblock.) I simply want actual standards that all browsers simply follow and don't deviate from. Maybe some extra features would also be helpful, though. (Better fluid layouts are a must!)
ShadowChao96
wow thx