Quote:Original post by Ekim_Gram
The Forum FAQ is usually a nice place to start off.

Quite fitting that this is a web dev forum, really... [smile]

FAQ

Anyway, I guess the most important thing would be a firm grasp of basic HTML and CSS. A good knowledge of a scripting language is useful - PHP and ASP are both pretty straightforwards. Talking to a database is something you'll do a lot of in a lot of web development stuff, so being comfortable with SQL is always useful.

Start with just basic html then move on from there into more advanced topics and technologies.

Quote:Original post by cpp_boy

Quote:Original post by SKATIN_HARD
Start with just basic html then move on from there into more advanced topics and technologies.

So, knowing html is a must, right ?

Yes it is. You can kind of compare it with the foundation for a house.

You need a basic understanding of HTML to be able to do any real web development.
Check out the W3 Schools' tutorials: W3 Schools were you'll find tutorials on HTML, XML, Browser scripting, Server scripting, .NET, Multimedia and Web Building.

Quote:Original post by cpp_boy

Quote:Original post by Saruman
I would say probably some of the biggest things in professional development of any kind is:

a) Knowing how to research for yourself.
b) Knowing how to learn for yourself.
c) Being self-sufficient.

Obviously that isn't the complete list, but you can research the others on your own quite easily.

Asking what you need to know is a little redundant, as you need to know how to build what the client wants and to be able to do it on time and on a budget.

...Snob...

Like it or not, Saruman is right.
For example, I do professional web development but have never looked into ASP.NET - namely because the systems we're developing work fine on cheap servers with old versions of PHP/MySQL. Does the fact that I don't know ASP.NET make me any worse at what I do? Not in my case, as the clients wouldn't know what the differences between ASP/ASP.NET/JSP/PHP/whatever were. They just want a system. You can't really make a list of things you "have" to know - apart from the very basics like HTML. Of course, I'll probably look into ASP.NET at some point in the future and if I can see a reason to use it and have a client who is willing to pay that little extra for ASP.NET hosting, so be it. Knowing what is available and being able to research a number of different options to try and fit what you want available to you into the budget is the important bit.

Of course, I could just list what I consider to be my useful skills for my job, and these are:

- Knowledge on how to set up a webserver. IIS under Windows and Apache. Seeing as we buy our hosting with the servers set up already, using .htaccess for our configuration is important. However, for local testing it's often much easier to use a locally running web server.
- Using SQL. Setting up MySQL, organising databases (the database structure is pretty important if you don't want to end up with an annoying and clunky design!)
- Scripting: PHP and ASP.
- Basic HTML and CSS.

Oh, and:

- Knowing how to use a search engine to find out about things that client requests, to see if we can integrate them with the system.

I can't think of anything else I need to know in my line of work. With all of the above, I seem to get by fine. [smile]