[web] HTML

The absolute best place to learning anything for web design is here. w3schools is fantastic. You won't need books if you work through the tutorials here.

If you can get a copy through your education system then it is still worth having something like Macromedia Dreamweaver. It is useful for syntax highlighting your source and such.

Hope that helps mate,

Dave

Well,
I learned HTML from the internet, but I do also have this book that helped me greatly. The Book..."HTML and XHTML The Definitive Guide".



It is a pretty good book. It does teach you a lot about what other browsers can and can't display. Some tags are Internet Explorer only, but most will go with Netscape and IE. Just google HTML Tutorials, or go to Amazon for some books on HTML. Read the reviews, and see if it is for you.




Chad.

1. W3Schools and Webmonkey are great resources. I haven't read a single book or taken a single course on web development.

2. You will have to learn a server-side language such as PHP, ASP or Perl/CGI to do anything useful with a form. There is more information about those in the above links.

I would go for PHP/MySQL, that's just my opinion though. PHP is a server-side language. MySQL is used for databases (which store data such as user info for a forum or the forum data it self).
A good book I think is (for PHP/MySQL) here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1893115518/qid=1134097850/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-1290363-3104632?n=507846&s=books&v=glance

For HTML, there are many tutorials on the internet that go into great depth of explaining HTML. The W3Schools like the others said above is a good choice.
Hope that helps.

I recommend keeping a good reference on hand. The O'Reilley "Dynamic HTML" is pretty good because it contains both the HTML language, &#106avascript, and the DOM (although it's of course not up to date with the latest browser revisions -- use the web as a reference for that).

Note that a forum does operations that are not client-side only, so you will need some kind of scripting on the server side. You can do this the old-school way with perl and cgi-bin, or using some embedded scripting server like the various Java app servers or IIS .NET, or using an embedded scripting language, like PHP inside Apache, or Ruby on Rails. Then you'll also need a way to store your data: either as files on disk, or as a database.

The take-away should be: for doing web applications (not just web pages), you need to learn some programming language that is not HTML; instead, it interacts with (and typically prints/generates) the HTML that runs in the web browser. If I were to start from scratch right now, I might look at Ruby on Rails, if only because it's the "hot new thing" right now. Meanwhile, I'm actually developing in Apache/PHP5/PostgreSQL.

If you prefer to use books to online tutorials, Teach yourself HTML in 24 hours is fantastic. I bought it around 6 years ago, and it's the only programming book I've ever read cover-to-cover. The only downside of this book is that at the end it recommends Teach Yourself &#106avascript in 24 hours as the next step, and that's possibly the worst programming book I've ever bought.<br><br>One of the best things about HTML is that it's so easy to apply what you learn. You'll have a web page within 15 minutes, and will add to it all the time. Seeing results this quickly is a real motivator and makes it very easy to learn.

Quote:

Original post by Dogs If you prefer to use books to online tutorials, Teach yourself HTML in 24 hours is fantastic. I bought it around 6 years ago, and it's the only programming book I've ever read cover-to-cover. The only downside of this book is that at the end it recommends Teach Yourself &#106avascript in 24 hours as the next step, and that's possibly the worst programming book I've ever bought.<br/><br/>One of the best things about HTML is that it's so easy to apply what you learn. You'll have a web page within 15 minutes, and will add to it all the time. Seeing results this quickly is a real motivator and makes it very easy to learn.<!--QUOTE--></td></tr></table></blockquote><!--/QUOTE--><!--ENDQUOTE--><br/><br/>i dont prefer books, but i have been told there are more realiable than online tutorials. which i can believe because any old person could make a online tutorial, but only a person who knows what there talking about can write a book + theres editors to edit stuff that may be wrong. also a book is handy whenever you need and you dont have to worry about pulling up a new browser or anything you can just open it right up on your desk. so after all this...maybe i do prefer books over online tutorials?<br/><br/>

also i have a bunch of websites on HTML and web design saved on my Wikipedia account watchlist. are those kind of websites on Wikipedia realible or no?

Quote:

Original post by enjoi5o50 1) does anyone have any recommendations on books, tips, suggestions anything that would help me get started would be great. I have already been recommended the book "HTML For Dummies", but thats it. 2) also, can you use HTML to create forums or do you have to learn something totally different to incorporate forums in your web sites? and i have gotten no recommendations on books on how to design forums.

1) There is literally tons of HTML books out there. I like the O'Reilly series for most web development. This book and its related books look promising.

2) Yes, you can use it to make some forms but not all, generally speaking if you use a form without some server side script (php, asp.net, perl, jsp, etc.) you will have very limited functionality. Therefore I incorporate &#106avascript into the mix even then though it's not enough, really though those server side languages are what you probably want.

My only advice is to practice making single web pages, have a reasonable book to learn from (such as the SAMS books... their &#106avascript book, is the one I started on), and use a forum like this to discuss problems.<br/><br/>Never use books for dummies, there's nothing to gain from them.<br/><br/>Daed.