Hi HN. I'm a college student studying physics. I've been pretty interested in startups for a while now, but I haven't really taken the time to truly invest myself into learning the tools required to build web apps. Would anyone be kind enough to give a quick crash course or point me in the right direction to get started? I see terms like jquery, ajax, javascript, ruby on rails, etc get chucked around all the time, yet I don't know how they fit together in one cohesive whole. It's my own fault for sure, but I would appreciate a gentle push in the right direction to begin to understand these concepts.<p>Thanks!
Web server sends pages to client on request. Examples are Apache and IIS.<p>Web server interacts with server-side scripting language. Examples are PHP and Ruby. Allows you to generate pages on the fly custom-designed for the user, and allows you to do useful things like templating via databases with ease.<p>Web application framework is built on top of server-side scripting language. These are designed to make life easier for the programmer. Examples are Ruby on Rails or Django.<p>Serves to a browser. Browser displays HTML (structured content), CSS (for designing the HTML), JavaScript (client-side programming language that deals with interaction on a page). Ajax is a buzzword for JavaScript communication with the server without refresh. jQuery is a library (essentially a bunch of useful functions designed to work together) for JavaScript that makes things like Ajax and selecting individual parts of HTML, something that's usually a pain, easy to do. Cookies allow small amounts of data-storage on the client-side.<p>Typically, people learn HTML first, then mess with a server-side language (or learn "how to program" in general), then once those two basic skills sets are there build on them at the same time.
Start with a static website on your own computer. You need to learn things in this order.<p>HTML<p>CSS so you can style your pages<p>JavaScript so you can do dynamic things<p>JQuery makes JavaScript much easier<p>With this you can actually publish a fully functional web site with a hosting company.<p>The server side is needed if you have a high volume site or one with dynamic content, such as a shopping site or with visitor created content. For that you need an application server: Django, PHP, Rails, Tomcat, Jboss, etc. About that time you will need to think about databases and SQL. My advice is to learn how to create good pages before learning the server side.