Comments on: Web Languages: Decoded

By: Lindsay K.

Lindsay K. — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 21:43:19 +0000

Quick question – I plan on building a math-based website that will need to be interactive. For example, you fill-in lines of inputs (numbers) and the site give you the answer to a math equation. What language would best suit this?

By: Jim

Jim — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 18:32:38 +0000

I would recommend PHP and MySQL before JS. Simply because PHP is way more powerful and easier to learn. JS can be a bitch to debug :)

By: Christopher

Christopher — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 04:47:27 +0000

Excellent Article, Alex I really liked it.

Christopher :)

By: Craig

Craig — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:25:30 +0000

Great post and the the programming languages highlighted are all great recommendations to get a really good start to web development!

By: Marin Todorov

Marin Todorov — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 10:09:15 +0000

@Jacob Gube – just stumbled upon this article after lot of time and saw your reply. Yes indeed “nothing to do with” is probably to strong of a statement!

It’s just I’m often bothered when job ads would freely exchange “writing markup” with “programming” and “html” with “php”. I often see a tagline like “A web ninja programmer wanted” (I mean … where all this ninja hype came from anyway?) and then they are looking for somebody who’s doing html/css and has experience with dreamweaver,flash and photoshop :)

Your point is valid : one should in the end understand all the technologies used in a web project; but being a good professional in specific area will in the end probably get you a better salary :)))

By: Ellie K

Ellie K — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 17:31:43 +0000

Alexander, thanks for putting together this post. I read it carefully, and then read all the comments.

I remain certain that I haven’t seen as concise but thorough overview of web development languages, scripts, protocols etc, with associated examples and even relative comparisons anywhere! Seriously. I’ve been looking for several months for something like this, that wasn’t a 500+ page book, or merely a small subset of what you covered.

The comments gave pointers and perhaps corrections. That’s okay, there’s always some subjectivity once you start drilling down to greater detail levels, and receive critique from people who already have a lot of knowledge.

However, this post is great for me, a mere HTML, CSS novice with Oracle SQL skill from my past! Thanks again.

By: steve

steve — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 19:37:43 +0000

Are mobile apps consider “Web”? Anyway, since I’m a newbie, the most logical or save way to web development path is following HTML > CSS > Javascript > PHP > MSQL right?

By: Alexander Dawson

Alexander Dawson — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 17:53:39 +0000

@Neil: You can’t have a website without HTML (or XML) so claiming it’s not a language to learn is fundamentally flawed. Even if you make use of PHP for server-side scripting, it requires HTML to serve the result to web browsers. Though I’m glad you enjoyed the read!

By: neil

neil — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 14:49:12 +0000

As language’s go and what employers here in the UK are asking for is:

xhtml, css, Javascript(jquery) and PHP. ASP.NET is also in high demand. Going up to the top of these comments…..after 13 years HTML is not a language to learn. Come on it’s what the web is built on and PHP is by far the preferred choice.

Great article though….enjoyed the read!

By: Scott Petrovic

Scott Petrovic — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 13:55:21 +0000

Great article. It can be a bit perplexing with all of the different languages out there. A future article that would be great is one on what you would use each language for. I don’t have much experience with Ruby or Java, so it is hard for me to sometimes decide which language I need to learn to do a particular task. Nothing in mind at the moment, but it would be good to know what is possible with each one and why people choose them.