How to Code - A Beginner's Guide

Author's Notes

Author's Notes and Introduction

I'll start by giving you a little bit of my background in this area of study. I began the same way must young programmers do. By learning the basics. Hyper-Text Markup-Language (HTML).

A friend of mine who had similar hobbies shared with me some of the basic tags associated with HTML and gave me a quick [ten minute] rundown of how to approach things, and more importantly, what each of the tags represented or influenced.

I've attended and graduated from college in 2008 with a specialized degree focused on website design and development after completing an a series of 11-week classes with each being between 1.5 and 3 hours in length.

One such class was strictly devoted to JavaScript, and through a fault in the school's systems had one of my buddies [who hadn't completed his HTML or even basic Dreamweaver courses] in the class with me. So, during the class I taught him everything that he would need to know for the class we were in.

Now, that was in the late 90's when I started learning, so web programming has developed and advanced quite a ways since then, yet the core fundamentals remain the same, and that is what I'm going to start explaining to you in the first few chapters.

By the time we've finished you'll have everything you need to create simple, static html files that function as web pages which you can open in your web browser.

There are a number of more advanced coding languages that allow people to create more dynamic and interactive pages. I'm not going to be touching on those in this volume, or any of the more intensive programming languages.

This book is being written with the absolute novice in mind. If you're one of those more capable and competent programmers, or find things moving too slowly in this book then you would likely benefit more from advanced self-study books.

While I plan to compile my notes on the more advanced programming languages, this is not that volume. I'm not planning to address anything more advanced than Cascading Style Sheets [CSS] in this volume.