How long does it take to become a web developer

This is almost like the question 'how long is a piece of string', because in my experience you can never stop learning.

The real question is how long does it take to become proficient as a web developer and my answer, in my opinion is about 2 years. This is obviously not a definitive answer and is subject to change, especially if you know a programming language for another discipline. The 2 year time frame should not put you off, but it will take you this amount of time to really truly understand all the ins and outs of web programming.

First let's take a look at what you technologies have to learn to become a web developer. When you start down this road, you need to understand how the web works and why it does what it does. What happens when a request is made by the user, how a server responds and how the output is generated by the browser.

The basic model for this piece of user interaction is like so:

The User Requests data via their browser -> The web server responds and sends HTML (Hypertext Markup Language - the language your browser understands) to your computer/device which then in turns displays it to you. That is it, the basic web request. A few other bits and pieces are sent but we'll look at those a little later.

So let's look at the above and break it down. The HTML this is the basic building block of the web and you cannot create a web page without knowing how write HTML. So this is obvious place to start, learning HTML is not that hard and you should be able to start knocking pages together within a week or so. The other part of learning how to write HTML is the ability to learn something called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS is a technology that allows a page's content (the HTML) and the page's design to be separated in to different elements. This allows for a more structured site, easier design updates and less cluttered mark up. Learning CSS can take a little longer to learn HTML as it has many different aspects to it. There are great many tutorials and books out there and any decent book that teaches you HTML should teach you CSS, if it doesn't, pick a different book. I have already written different post regarding books for beginners, so please take a look there for my recommendations. You should be able to grasp a good amount of CSS in a few weeks/months for you to be able to start knocking web pages together, it can take a couple of years to master CSS as there are so many ways of doing things. i.e. using different methods to solve different issues, different properties for different elements and coupled with the fact that it is constantly being updated by the W3c, it gives CSS and long a drawn out learning curve.

The previous paragraphs, really dealt with the browser/client side of what websites and how they work. The next sections really deal with how a server sends a page to the user. At a basic level a server responds with HTML based on a request from the user. These pages can be static - where a page's content is hard coded in to the request page or dynamic - where a page is constructed and delivered according to a set of parameters. Dynamic pages are still served in HTML, this is the only language a browser can intepret, the difference with a dynamic page is that the page's content can be manipulated by the server when it sends the information.

This is where you really start to become a 'web developer', when you start to learn a language that runs on a web server and is executed at run time. There are a great many choices when it comes to choosing the language, my personal preference is PHP, many others like ASP.net or Java - all work in a similar way and all perform similar tasks though PHP allows you to code using both procedural and object oriented approaches (see other posts of mine regarding this). This part of the learning curve is going to be the longest. You should be able, once you have grabbed the principles of programming, to start programming in PHP and even start creating some dynamic pages within a couple of months, even less if you are doing it full time. Believe me, if you stick with it and you like coding, when you start creating programs, see people using them, then you really feel an excellent sense of worth. However to truly understand the language of PHP is going to take a while, you may be able to create some decent scripts quickly, but like I said before it will probably take you a couple of years, before you get to the point where you are truly comfortable with language. An example of this is where you get to the point that you know that no matter what a customer/colleague asks you to do, you know that you will be deliver what ever they need.

Once last thing, before I sign off. People often ask 'Am I am scripter or a programmer ?' This is a large can of worms and I do not wish to reopen it as it has been argued to and fro by many people. In my opinion, a script is something that runs on a single page, an application is something that runs across many pages and does multiple tasks geared towards a set of goals or objectives.

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.