Ideas For Beginning Web Developers

<i>Don’t spend much time building any of these projects. Get the to minimum list of requirements you’d like each site to have and move onto the next one. Do them over the weekend and don’t let them stagnate for too long.</i><p>I would revise this: Spend as much time as you want. If you get interested in something - keep going. Don't force yourself to keep moving according to this arbitrary list. Go where your interest takes you. JUST. KEEP. GOING!

Nice list. Along the lines of post yesterday, I'd encourage the developer to use an IDE and gems as little as possible in order to truly get what's going on under the covers. Also, the moving on is an excellent point. I've recently started an app-a-month goal for myself (I'm married with 2 kids) in order to keep myself shipping. I don't know how many times I've rewritten my mp3 site since 2002 :)<p>Here's one more comment.<p>11. Add Unit tests to anything you've developed that you want to keep developing.

(slightly off-topic) Just out of curiosity. Is there a web framework in any language that can compete with Perl's Mojolicious? <a href="http://mojolicio.us/" rel="nofollow">http://mojolicio.us/</a><p>I know Mojo offer more but I would like to know whether there is another language with a framework where you have a complete box that is easy to deploy on any platform, comes with built in templates, comes with tools for testing, the ability to seamlessly grow Sinatra-style application into well structured Rail like stuff, a good plugin interface, a WWW library to directly get JSON or DOM elements from a remote location in one command, logs, interfaces for cgi, fastcgi, etc., production and development server with helpful exception handling inside the browser.<p>I know you can have all of this when you use libraries, but it makes applications harder to deploy and maintain. Besides that it's way easier to write and read stuff when it's an all in one solution. I looked for something like that in Node.js and Ruby, but couldn't find anything.

I agree. Reading books and materials can only take you so far. In my experience, after reading an iOS dev book for countless time, you think you get it, but after a few weeks.. you tend to forget all about them. Eventually, i decided on a project to work on, and when i get stuck, refer to the book and continue working on it until it is done. I think the concept sticks better that way, plus you get a sense of satisfaction of a finished product..

A wiki is a simple idea that beginning web developers can get started with. <a href="http://riki.heroku.com/" rel="nofollow">http://riki.heroku.com/</a> was one of the first web applications I wrote a few years ago (using Rails 2.1.0).

As someone looking for some direction on starting Rails development, I'd just like to post a "Thanks", both for the list and the motivation.

Good article. Now, I begin to build a todo web service.

I disagree strongly with the article's premise. Don't take a job where a language and framework has been chosen that you don't know, where you are still at the point where building basic websites is a 'project'. Why not? Because obviously the company you are working for has no idea what they are doing with their time and money, and you're therefore unlikely to be in an environment with skilled coworkers.<p>If you are really a beginning web developer, read the HTTP RFC. Learn HTML. Learn Javascript. Learn CSS. Learn basic Unix. Pick one simple project and implement it in three different languages. Then implement it with three different database layers. Then implement it with three different web servers. Then implement it on three different operating systems or at least Linux distributions.<p>Now try to benchmark and scale. Compare multiple front end load balancers. Compare various NoSQL database architectures and caching solutions. Try some cloud hosting, see where it falls down.<p>This will teach you far more than fiddling in one framework.