Linux Users Group Manipal

Welcome to Web Development Section of LUG-Manipal
This document is divided into various levels for people of varying knowledge.

NOVICE: People who havnt even had a taste of web designing
BEGINNER: People who just started but face a dilemma where and how to continue
EXPERT: People who have done web designing before and want to advance to generate dynamic pages.

NOVICE

FIrst of all HTML is the simplest language I have ever seen in my life, HTML is exactly not a programming language, you cannot create dynamic pages with HTML, only static pages can be created. HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. Its a markup language. We use tags for creating structures. You dont need the knowledge of C/C++ or Java for learning HTML.

I suggest you to get the HTML,XHTML and CSS Bible eBook, its an excellent book. Leave aside XHTML and CSS and just concentrate on HTML, XHTML is a topic of interest for EXPERT of GURU’s. Download the book from
Link: http://mihd.net/ktyu4c
The password for the rar file is: giftfromfatherxmas

Apart from this you can have access to great online tutorials at www.w3schools.com . The tutorials are very easy and will accustom you to the basics of HTML. Try creating pages or your own custom pages.
The tutorials are: http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp
Learn all the basics of the HTML, no need to go very deep, deep concepts are really not implemented in real practice.

BEGINNER:

By this time you would have learnt HTML, you would also have known that using colour codes can improve the beauty of your site. You should use less of images and more of colours for getting the effects. If you need a big green banner of 300X20 pixels, you could make a picture of 10X20 pixels and tile it. You should lay stress of how making your code more effective such that it doesnt take much time to load. Try optimizing the code as given in the above example.

You should also know how to use CSS, deep knowledge of CSS is not required, still there is no harm in learning CSS deeply if you relish it. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. Its like keeping the colours, alignment and other attributes of the pages apart from the main page, they are imported into the main page and used. This clearly leads to easier coding, less errors and more cleaner layout of the code. Less work has to be done in coding.
The basic tutorials are here at: http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp
If you want more detailed explanation, you should use the above book prescribed for NOVICE, if you still feel that you need more, we have a complete book dedicated for it.
Book: http://rapidshare.com/files/11116629/Core_CSS_-_Cascading_Style_Sheets__2Ed.zip
Password for Unraring: ebookspyder.net

EXPERT:

You people belong to those class of people who are familiar with web programming, now you want to go to generate some real-time dynamic pages. Dynamic pages means like the same pages given different output for different inputs. If you are checking the results at a site where you eneter the reg no, you will get different results each time you enter different reg nos.

Now we have different languages for generating dynamic pages. They include PHP, JavaScript, Python, ASP, ASP.NET, VBScript. We shall deal only with Open Source languages. The languages which will be guided at the beginning are PHP and Python which are purely Open Source and Free languages. It means that all the core files for creating the translator (like compiler) of these language are open.
Here I will guide you people only with PHP which is my specification field. PHP also has a database software associate with it named MySQL, we shall see it later. First I shall give you some links so that you yourself shall understand what exactly it is, they are
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Php
http://www.php.net/
http://www.softwareprojects.org/php-what-is-01.htm

Now let me introduce this fantastic language, it is one of the most powerful languages I have ever seen, keep keep running around ASP.NET without thinking that something better even exists. Unlike ASP.NET or other closed source languages, PHP is community developed and supported languages, you can find tonnes of tutorials and millions of people to help you out with PHP. PHP is highly customizable and has many libraries which can be extended as and when required. PHP is usually associated with a database software called MySQL which I suppose is the best database software for me after Oracle. Dont get frightened with the reference of the word Database, you can skip it for later when you master PHP. PHP can work even without MySQL,but MySQL’s presence greatly increases PHP’s power.

Where to start learning:

Now the question is from where to learn PHP? Without wasting time I would like to give you two references which you would more than important. One is PHP and MySQL Bible eBook and the other is the official PHP Manual by PHP Foundation.
PHP and MySQL Bible: http://rapidshare.com/files/13359010/b0007.rar.html
Password if asked: sharelp.com

PHP Manual: http://in.php.net/get/php_manual_en.chm/from/a/mirror
This PHP Manual is chm file, Linux users please install gnochm(GNOME) or kchmviewer(KDE) for opening chm files

Installing PHP on your system
Windows: Get WampServer for your system, it is some 20MB download, when installed, takes some 130MB disk space. It includes Apache(a webserver), PHP(translator for PHP) and MySQL (a database software). Get WAMP from www.wampserver.com
You should have Firefox installed since it gives better performance as i have experienced. While installing it may ask your Windows Firewall to unblock a port, please allow it otherwise PHP wont work.
Linux: Long back I had written a post for installing LAMP on ubuntu but it should also work on all other systems, if it doesnt, just contact me, the link for that tutorial is http://www.manishtech.info/2007/07/01/installing-lamp-on-your-ubuntu-system/
And please do atleast this much , by the time I write tutorials explaining how to use PHP.