The Author – Bart Busschots
Creative Commons
Unless otherwise stated, the content on this site is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial, No Derivative Works 3.0 License
Oct
23
PBS 2 of X – Introducing HTML
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Software Development on October 23, 2015 | 4 Comments
The first baby-step we’ll take towards real programming is the Hyper-Text Markup Language, better known to us all as HTML. HTML is not a true programming language, it is instead a simpler beast known as a markup language – it adds context to text. HTML allows us to mark certain parts of a document as headings, other parts as paragraphs, and yet other parts as being emphasised etc.. Like with programming, we are conveying meaning to the computer, but the range of possible things we can ‘say’ is much smaller and simpler.
Modern best practices for web development are the result of decades of evolution. We’re going to ignore all the techniques that time and experience have shown to be mistake, and jump straight to the end of the story – modern best practice. There have also been many versions of HTML over the years, and again, we’re going to jump straight to the end of the story, and use the latest incarnation of the Hyper-Text Markup Language, HTML5.
Before we dive into the specifics, I want to take a moment to explain the larger context in which we’ll be using HTML. When HTML was originally developed, it was designed to describe both what different elements of a web page were, and, what they should look like. Experience has taught us that this is a terrible idea, so we no longer use HTML in this dual role. Instead, HTML is now just half of a duo of languages used to create a web page – the other partner being Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS. We use HTML to describe what each part of the page is, and CSS to describe how each marked up element on the page should be styled.
We’ll be moving on to CSS once we finish describing HTML. Until we get CSS, the web pages we create will look exceptional plain and frankly boring, but don’t worry, we’ll move on to CSS soon enough, and then you can really let your creative juices fly!
Oct
9
PBS 1 of X – Introduction
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Software Development on October 9, 2015 | 17 Comments
Computer programming is a very powerful skill – it literally lets you tell computers exactly what to do. Contrary to what you may believe, learning to program is not about learning any specific programming language, but about learning the principles shared by all languages. Once you grasp the fundamental principles, you can move from language to language with relative ease. In my two decades of programming I have programmed in X86 Assembler, BASIC, C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, BASH, Lisp, Maple, Matlab, and more. While doing so I’ve also made use of other computer languages that are not quite programming languages, but still involved telling a computer what you mean like SQL, HTML, CSS, XML & JSON. The point I really want to drive home is that you are not a Java programmer, or a PHP programmer, or a Perl programmer – you are a programmer! The tool you happen to use most today is unlikely to be the one you use most a decade from now. 15 years ago I did 90% of my programming in Java, 10 years ago, PHP, today, Perl, next year, who knows!
In case you hadn’t guessed yet, I’m not going to pick a single computer language for this series of tutorials. I’m very deliberately going to make use of a pallet of languages, and I’m going to focus on the underlying principles, rather than the specific peculiarities of any given language.
In order to help bring everyone along, I’m also not going to go from zero to real programming in one go. The plan is to sneak up on programming in small steps – hence the title of the series. We will be using computer languages from the start, but initially, they won’t be programming languages. Also, in order to be as inclusive as possible, I’m going to avoid vendor-specific languages – that means no Apple Script, no VB Script, no Objective C, and no C# (pronounced ‘see-sharp’ BTW). Instead, I’m going to use the most universal platform of all – the world wide web. We’re going to sneak up on programming by learning to create web pages.