Website design -what should I learn

[kained&able]

I played the MMRPG Dark Age of Camelot so much that my wife seriously threatened to divorce me unless she had written proof that I had cancelled my subscription.

geek.


dave

 

[Al Kahul]

By The way I know Luton very well . I often stay with friends off Cardiff St

 

[psykoptic]

Need Windows 2008 webserver which is an extra cost. But the .Net development platform is second to none. Even the free ones are pretty decent. Can use SQL express which is free.

You don't need Windows Server 2008 for development. IIS is available on XP Pro and the newer shiney IIS7.0 is available on most versions of Vista (even the home edition apparently) Even if you are running XP Home you can use Cassini, .NET's built in development server, although tbh for heavy weight stuff its not ideal.

There are free 'Express' versions of all the apps you need, Microsoft's attempt to give away free stuff against the open source channels.

SQL Server Express is very good, an almost full version of the main enterprise database platform, which has loads of stuff you wouldn't really use for web development anyway, especially if you are just learning. The Web Developer Express app is pretty decent too, although some key things are missing, but if you were just learning you probably wouldn't notice.

Linux, Apache and PHP are all free. Unfortunately PHP while fine as a language is a bit of a dogs dinner. Has suffered from a lack of direction.

Interestingly I've been reading a lot about this with PHP recently, 12 built in functions to do the same thing etc etc. PHP and Zend is supposed to be a nice platform to work on. And if you don't want to tackle Linux you can run PHP/Apache/MySQL on Windows.

Generally there are more resources for PHP, but a lot of it is script-kiddie nonsense and a waste of time. .NET tends to be more structured, and has a lot more best-practice stuff built in. There are some excellent .NET resources around, but often you'll have to think for yourself more (.net can be really unforgiving sometimes) rather than just copy and paste somebody elses PHP.