What is it be a web developer?

This piece is not about the history of the web, more about how the web grows and how new technologies constantly change the nature of what it means to be a web developer.

The Internet is growing (nothing new there with that statement). When a new idea or piece of technology springs up, developers are needed to be able to write software for it so that the new innovation gains ground and popularity.

The term 'web developer' came about because the web became the most sought after use for the Internet. When this happened people wanted to access information quickly and reliably. As a result web developers started programming on systems and servers that could dish out this information in a better way. With the integration of databases and server side coding, it allowed websites to move on from the stateless nature of HTML that is when Tim Berners-Lee developed it.

As time has moved on the web has gone from strength to strength. The other huge leap forward was advent of Javascript, a programming language that allowed coders to manipulate the pages that users saw in their browsers. This allowed websites to start behaving more the more traditional applications that ran on PCs and other computers. Of course it was only matter of time when the two started to inter mingle to give us even better applications and lo and behold Ajax sprang up when Microsoft created the XMLHttpRequest Object which allowed developers to send asynchronous requests to servers without the page reloading, thus enhancing even further the web experience. Ajax was designed to work with both XHTML and XML so that information could be injected and updated quickly and using less resources. Why reload the whole page when you only need to change the information in a single element? XML and the many web services created to use it allowed people to integrate information from website to another in a standardised way and crossed the divides that sprung up from the use of different systems.

The web didn't stop there over time, newer ideas and innovations continued to spring up all over the shop and applications became more and more complex. Social Media started to come in to the main stream and integration between web sites and applications became more and more common. MySpace and Facebook started to come to fruition and the web continued to make new ground with many people that had considered the web to be a fad with those 'young people'.

With the advent of Ajax it allowed applications to be made and resemble desktop programs, but there was a problem that became apparent as time went on. As with most javaScript functionality it had its problems with the numerous browsers that were available in the market. It was also quite code intensive and lots of testing was usually needed to make sure code with all browsers. That is where my topic pops up and that topic is jQuery. jQuery is a javaScript framework and has ironed out many of the problems that made javaScript such a pain to work with in the first place. DOM traversal, Ajax calls and element selection was made easier and standardised, no more cross compatibility testing to make sure things worked in firefox and IE. Debugging and development time has become vastly decreased, something of which, if you are a business can be passed on when you quote your customers for work.

So what is the future for the web. Well in my opinion, the future is becoming smaller. Well it is terms of the web. Mobile technology is becoming more and more common and I think that is where a lot of the future innovations will lie. Apple and Google have both moved into the mobile phone market and making a lot of people think about using their mobile device as the primary device for accessing the Internet. I myself have bought a mac mini to develop applications for iPhone as I want to keep with up with how the market is changing. I haven't actually created an app yet as I have too many commitments in other areas but the area between desktop applications and web applications are coming together quicker than ever, something of which I think will change the web and the Internet forever.

My PHP development Book List (Advanced)

Advance your PHP knowledge...

I hope you all enjoyed my recommendations on PHP books for beginners. I now give you my list for more advanced books that will take you further into the world of PHP programming and development.

1. I touched upon this book in the beginners book list, but feel like it should be mentioned upon more here. Advanced PHP 5 by Larry Ullman would be the first book I would start to read if I was to go in to more Advanced PHP 5 programming and the reasons are as follows. It has great reference chapters on XML, Ajax and OOP - all of which I would recommend you move on to with more detailed books (some of which are listed below). Each chapter is (relatively) light weight and will give you a good grounding in the subject.

2. The next book I would take a look at is PHP Object-Oriented Solutions by David Powers for friends of Ed. This is a brilliant book, I didn't learn OOP from this book, but from looking at it retrospectively I wished I had. It's great book to learn from and (chapter 2 especially) works as a great reference manual should you need it.

You quickly realise when you are building your applications that you often have retype lots and lots of code. OOP is based on code reusability and modularity so that once you have classes in place, the hard work is done. OOP is also good for those who have to keep one eye on the profitability of their business i.e. free lance developers. With OOP in PHP, you can use common classes so that your time can be utilised in a more efficient manner.

I recommend OOP to all people learning PHP, it may take you more time in the early stages when you are designing and building your class, but once the classes are finished you will find your projects running far smoother. Getting one's head around OOP can be tricky so, unless you can do it in another language I would leave this until you really feel comfortable with the language before you proceed.

3. To learn Ajax with PHP I would use Ajax And PHP Building Responsive Web Applications by Cristian Darie et. all. If you managed to master many of the concepts in JavaScript and PHP then this shouldn't be too hard a book to digest. Not only does teach you about Ajax and how to use it with PHP and MySQL, it also gives you real life examples of concepts that can be used in most modern websites.

N.B. I would suggest that you work through at least some of the chapters in the previous book as this Ajax book does use PHP OOP concepts.

Ajax is a brilliant concept and again, it is something that I would recommend all developers to at least try. Not only does it add that all important visual flair to pages, it also has other benefits too. If server loads are an issue, either through the amount of data or instructions they can handle it helps as only the parts of a page that are needed are sent from the server, rather than the server having to send the whole page again.

My PHP development Book List (Beginners)

Learning PHP and web development from scratch...

Learning a new language can be difficult, especially when you haven't got someone looking over your shoulder trying to help you. That is why we have text books and believe me, some are definitely better than others. This is not just a statement based on 1 example, there were numerous times throughout my time at university that we were given a recommended reading list and the books that were supposed to help, were in fact just being endorsed by some unscrupulous lecturer who wanted to line their pockets - though this could never be proven. If you are reading this as a student, then please before you buy a book that has been 'recommended' take a look at some reviews on web sites that are freely available, after all £30 of your loan cheque is quite sizeable. I have numerous books that were truly awful and have never seen the light of day since the 13 times I attempted to read them.

Anyway, back to the subject at hand:

Here are a list of books I would use to start learning PHP and web development from scratch. You may disagree with me and that's fine, I may open comments on this post, so please do leave me your choices. You may find that I recommend the same published on numerous occasions, I am endorsing any published over another and all recommendations are purely my opinion based on my own experiences.

1. Start at the beginning - Learn (X)HTML - I was a fresh faced first year when I started learning HTML and loved it almost immediately. I had never done any real programming at this point and found it awe inspiring that you could write something in Notepad, refresh it in a browser and there you go, rendered immediately and outputting your thoughts to the world. The book I used for this was by a lady named Elizabeth Castro called 'HTML 4 for the World Wide Web' which was published in 1999 by Peachpit Press. It has of course been updated for the modern age of W3C standards and is now called HTML, XHTML, and CSS by the same author. This is a fantastic book, moves a manageable pace and unlike then will help you learn HTML and CSS all in one go, rather than how I learnt the two technologies years ago when CSS was just a bit of an extra to be used in your HTML. Technically HTML isn't programming, you are writing Markup but it will get used to many things that as a programmer will be using later on in your career i.e. attributes, properties (in CSS) and referencing different parts of your code.

2. It's another Peachpit publication, this time from Larry Ullmang. PHP and MySQL is now in its third editon and is still going strong. I have had to buy this a couple of times (different editions) as I still use for it a little bit of reference. My first edition was worn out very quickly, constant flicking through the pages and index to find what I need took its toll and as a result my first copy is in numerous parts.

Larry is a great programmer and teacher (as I have mentioned in other posts) as he can teach without laying too much on the student. He also has another more advanced PHP book which will advance your knowledge over a number of key subjects, i.e. OOP in PHP and Ajax with PHP. I would recommend that you build a number of sites first before you tackle that book as it can be heavy going in places. The advanced book is definitely more of reference manual and can be dipped in and out of, rather than the PHP MySQL which I would recommend reading in its natural order.

3. Now that you have hopefully sites coming together. I would recommend taking a look at JavaScript. Javascript has had its ups and downs (mainly due to unscrupulous coders and hackers) but has since had a well deserved revival. I like Javascript, it adds an extra dimension to a web site and makes a site feel more like a desktop application than a website (even more so when Ajax is used). However it can be a quirky language, some of the naming and referencing conventions can be tricky, but once you get the hang of it, you will love it.

JavaScript as well as being a programming language for your browser, it also gives you access to the DOM (Document Object Model) and when you learn to manipulate it, can give you some really impressive looking results.

The reason I have added Javascript after PHP is that it looks rather similar to PHP in terms of the code and that with PHP you only have to worry about 2 or 3 real events. Page Load and then GET and POST. JavaScript has many more events and uses objects (HTML elements etc) to add to its functionality.

So the book I recommend for learning JavaScript is the JavaScript Bible (now in its 6th edition) by Danny Goodman et al. A brilliant book, set a good pace and has a massive reference section for you to look almost every property, method and attrbute in the language. It also teaches you about the DOM and how to create scripts that affect it, so is a very good all round.

There are more books that I have used but I will talk about them in my next post. These books will move in to more advanced areas including Object Oriented Programming, Ajax and a few other areas.