PYthon/Django...recent article on teaching yourself:
http://tech.yipit.com/2012/08/21/how...de-in-8-weeks/

And obviously:
http://www.djangobook.com/

Yup. But you have to start somewhere, and you'll learn a crapload as you go.

FWIW djangobook.com is pretty out of date at this point although it is still probably pretty useful.

The contractor part reminds me of my company's website. A while back, we had some dude working in-house to do a "make-over" of the site. Turned out that he only managed to change the home-page. I'm not going to get into how the file system works on the site, but the HTML is all table layouts. The guy who "made over" the homepage created a new homepage, so instead of simply hand-coding readable HTML, he copy-pasted all of the table
layout from the original homepage and the proceeded to hand-code the
page in tables. Now, my company has two home-pages: "/" (all HTML) and
"/index.php" (the original homepage). I have zero idea why he decided
to do redo the front-page like this -- He didn't change the index.php
because he didn't know any PHP at all -- I don't understand why he
decided to not hand code in something more normal. He also couldn't
figure out how to make the page work in IE. Turns out that there
wasn't any doctype declaration.

I am sort of mystified at why you wouldn't be able to just hard-code
the HTML however you want to. I guess it's due to my knowledge limits, but I only know of 3 ways to interop HTML with higher level code:

Create the HTML via code-generation: This is the way I am currently doing it. Having prefix notation makes it pretty intuitive and saves a lot of typing. I can definitely understand the argument against this, but honestly, anyone who can write semi-valid HTML can learn this stuff.

Path Expressions in the nature of html/body/element/element-id, then you can generate content and other routing via the paths. The positive is that you can have someone do the markup in html and save it as some .hml (or whatever) and then do page-changes via code. I don't like this too much because it looks like I would be doing everything twice, but I can see the benefit. The only issue is that after hard-wiring the code to the HTML, it feels like the coder may as well have done the html anyways.

getElementById: This is the classic PHP way, right?

So, I can't imagine anyone used a code-generator to create a huge cluster of tables like you described, and I really doubt anyone used path expressions, though you could do html/body//elementId or something like that. The generator is impossible because you have access to the hard HTML, right? And the path seems unlikely because once you change the HTML, the whole system breaks. Finally, I really don't believe you don't know how to cull the requisite id's to make it all work.

I have seen the SEO / Buzzword angle work to amazing effect with my employers. I think it takes considerable experience to get to that level where you can make these lines sound like sugar to people's ears. Basically, when that person was in, I walked out the meeting spitting nails. I never heard such a long string of garbage nonsense and out-right lies in my life. I give it to his company: they have quite a few clients, but a sucker is born every minute. I think that to sell it well, at least to the client you describe, you have to know nothing at all about how it works. Non-technical people simply have no notion of what is hard and what is easy, and as far as I can tell, their perceptions are polar opposite to reality.

Well...I've sent a few emails to the vendor and hopefully will hear back. I honestly don't have any access to anything on the backend (asp). I can't take offense as I don't blame you for questioning this. I can't really show you the product as that seems icky (and requires a host file edit). You'll just have to take my word that I'm not completely incompetent.

Honestly...I just finished my week and go back Monday again. They can tell I'm not happy, but keep having me back. I should just keep my mouth shut and collect checks, but producing ****ty work is a thing that I'm not happy about (and a lot of their problem is a lack of project management).

on the bright side, I've learned a lot about CSS in the process. For instance...as I don't have access to the HTML generating code, I've had to write things like this:

.ContentCustomerFeatureCell > table > tbody > tr:first-child{
display:none;
}

.ShipBillInformation_ShipToDescTable > tbody > tr:nth-child(3) > td{
padding-top:8px;
}


not to mention my abusing of the content property

I was NOT intending to question your competency. Trust me, I am not one that has any right to do so.

I think it's cool that the employer is at least willing to let you contact the company, so it sounds like a little progress.

LOL. This sounds exactly like my job. The difference is that everyone, including my coworkers, know I am miserable there. I have zero idea why they keep me around either.

Haha. Table layouts are just awful. I can't believe there is any debate at all about table vs css on the internet. The tables on my company's website are all the same, but inline of course. There is CSS on the site, but it points to nowhere at all.

Thought I'd chime in with a little bit of hopefully useful advice.

I work as a web developer and have done for 8 years. My advice to you would be to start at the front end and get a good foot in with HTML and CSS. Once you have this, and it could take you as little as a month or so, start applying for jobs as a junior developer. Seriously. Show potential employers that you are motivated, keen to learn and hard working and you will have no issues.

In my experience (I'm from the UK but currently living and working in New Zealand - though I'd assume this applies to North America too), there is HUGE demand for web developers and many companies are more than willing to take on juniors. I was at my previous (UK) company for just over 3 years and we were constantly advertising for new developers. There were stories all over the news about how few jobs there were in the country and how many people were unemployed but we received hardly any applications to the posted jobs. The majority of applicants were from India or from agencies where they were just sending over resumes from everyone on their books who had seen a computer on the TV once in the hope that 1 would stick and they'd get their commission. It was very rare to get an application where someone actually indicated a desire to be a web developer and weren't from India. Every single one that did scored themselves an interview - without exception - and we hired about half of those.

During my time there we hired 5 new developers. One of them had ~10yrs experience, one had just graduated from university and was pretty well skilled but the others had zero experience other than a bit of HTML and CSS.

Junior developers are great for a company because they are relatively cheap and there is always, always, "dog work" to do. Why would they want to get one of the $70k a year developers to move an image or change some copy when they can get a $28k Junior to do it. As the junior doing these minor amends you get to delve deeper into code and you quickly start figuring things out. You are also placed in an environment where you can learn from the other developers. You find yourself learning very very quickly and this learning is self perpetuating. The more you learn, the more opens up to you to learn. Within a year of working, you'll be able to drop the "junior" from your job title and the relatively crappy salary that goes with it.

Shoe Lace makes it look pretty intimidating but even after 8 years I don't know half that stuff and probably never will. You learn what you need to as you go to achieve the goal set to you by the client.

If you don't know something, a quick search on Stack Overflow will answer your question. If it doesn't, then posing the question there will have it answered, more often than not, with the working code that you need.

Every single day, this job let's me know that there is so much more to learn and as a result I learn new things every day and that is what keeps it interesting.

You blew up at your boss because he asked why you didn't actually finish the work you told him was finished the previous week? If one of my developers did that, they'd likely get shown the door.

Here's a pro tip: If you're coding front-end, it's not "done" until it works in every target browser. And stop blaming the lack of PM - there's only you and a designer involved. There's no reason you can't coordinate that without a PM. Your boss doesn't give a **** about the technical challenges. At most, he cares that the software that generates the HTML is difficult to work with, but really he only cares because it means you'll take longer to do what he's paying you to do.

I mostly agree Zurvan but
Would mean that I'm gone before they could fire me.

The second part, sure. But the "why didn't you make it work the first time", when he said it worked? That's a completely rational response for a boss. If you tell me it's done, it better be done.

Yeah, to be honest, if you knew IE 7 was a target, and you work with CSS all the time, why weren't you testing it?

If you didn't know IE 7 was a target, that was a mistake on *both* ends. Not to know the target browser *and* not to be told it.

Hey guys - which of these courses would you suggest for someone with 0 exp in web dev/programming that wants to get the basics and would be most usefull to start building a basic site? Also taking into account what's the language "of the future", since I wouldn't wanna learn something that's getting out of favor. I tried some of the online stuff but going to an University course would motivate me a lot more.

1)HTML5 AND CASCADING STYLE SHEET
2)JAVASCRIPT AND JQUERY
3)ADOBE DREAMWEAVER FUNDAMENTALS --> preq course for SEO course
4)OBEJECT ORIENTED PROGRAMMING WITH C#

Or none of the above. Thanks

1 and 2

If they make you learn Dreamweaver to learn SEO they're probably not worth your time.

1 & 2 definitely.

I wouldn't bother with Dreamweaver at all to be honest. You are better off figuring out everything you need by writing the code yourself. You are able to "cheat" when you use Dreamweaver which is a good thing if want to get to an end goal but it won't help your learning experience. Get a decent (and free) text editor such as Notepad++.

Sublime text 2 is also an amazing free editor.

ST2 isn't really free fwiw. You should really buy a license if you want to use it long term.

Won't argue that you shouldn't buy a license but it is free for all intents and purposes currently.

wow at Dreamweaver (prereq for SEO)

lol.

thx guys

I got a job as a graduate web applications developer 3 months ago after finishing a masters in scientific computing. I hadn't done any web technologies in college so initially I was a bit bamboozled with all the stuff I had to learn (html, css, jquery, ASP.NET, Oracle, xml, web services etc). After doing a lot of reading and playing around I've got the hang of most things except for all of the different layers and design patterns. Overall I find it a a bit dull. Maybe it's because I'm from a mathematical background and there's basically zero maths involved.
Are any of these skills transferable if I try and get a more mathematically related job in the future?

Well if you're doing it right, learning professional practices of design, control, testing, and the life cycle of a project, those can transfer to anything.

and it never hurts to be able to throw up a decentish website for any idea/project you might have

...anything in the field of programming. Probably not so much use in careers that just happen to make use of programs (like data analysts or statisticians)