Coding Languages
Resources to learn languages
Lynda.com - Free to all McCombs students
Udemy.com - Signup for an account and see many classes go on sale. Great way to learn web development (recommend Rob Percival's "Complete Web Developer" course).
W3School - perfect site for beginners to learn HTML/CSS/JavaScript/Bootstrap
CodingBat
CodeAcademy
LAMP Stack development
Email notifications in PHP - Click here for more details on how to setup email notifcations in PHP
CSS
Use for developing any general interactivity between website and user
Use when styling a website after HTML structure is established
Know that there are CSS tools and frameworks that are readily available for use, such as Twitter Bootstrapor Semantic UI
Twitter Bootstrap: a free and open-source CSS framework directed at responsive, mobile-first front-end web development. It is the most popular framework used due its massive library, large support,and naming scheme.
Other good tips to keep in mind:
How you name classes is absolutely key: the general principle is names should be short and sweet. They should be intuitive so other teammates/contributors/leads can understand what a variable does quickly.
There is a difference between IDsand classes and how they are called:
ID can be used to identify one element, whereas a class can be used to identify more than one
Classes are preceded by a full stop (“.”), while ID’s are preceded by a hash character (“#”)
An HTML element/div can implement more than one CSS class–use this to provide HTML all the style that is needed .
Browsers interpret classes from left to right and from up to down. This means that any similar functionality implemented before could be overwritten by something as a browser interprets the page.
Javascript
Use for developing any general interactivity between website and user
Learn how to use basic Javascript
Understand how websites dynamically update in response to user activity via Javascript (ex. checkboxes, alerts, or displaying calculated results)
There are special types of variables in javascript that store data in slightly different ways○Session variables are variables that exist only while the user's session with an application is active.
Session variables are specific to each visitor to the app. They’re used to store user-specific information that can be accessed by multiple pages in a web application.
Session variables are valuable when you have no need for a database. When you need to hold data only for the time a user is on a page like our app required, consider using this as a tool.
For more information on other special types of variables, such as cookies, local storage, watch this explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwicscsvGLg
For RESTful applications, Postman offers free input/output testing for all your application’s end-points. It will also come with in-depth documentation on how to use your backend end-points if needed for technical clients.