Its time to quit fooling around and put the nose to the old grind stone, oh and put out some good content along the way. I am hoping to chronicle my journey into web development, and the first major project will be the customization of this site. Perhaps a little history is in order….
I began my curiosity with the web about 2 years ago, and a dropped an email to a friend of a friend; a Ruby on Rails god John Nunemaker. Despite his great advice I do nothing for a year. I puts around on sitepoint.com (a great resource for beginners and experts), and find their free sample book chapters very helpful. Yet its hard to just dive in and get my mind around everything that’s involved in the modern web. Per John’s advice, I finally pick up a copy of Designing with Web Standards (apparently its the Bible for web heads, and highly recommended for anyone doing things on the web). The book gives me some great bearings and I dive into CSS and XHTML with just online tutorials guiding the way and this guy encouraging me. After hours of going in circles of confusion I pound out a basic site that separates content from presentation, and I rejoice! I realized that a formal class really is necessary to get a firm foundation of CSS and XHTML, well for me at least. Being an undergrad engineering student at Notre Dame (goodbye Michigan fans, thanks for reading 
), I get into a CSS class taught by John’s business partner Steve Smith; a CSS god and really cool guy (he even brews his own beer, I mean come on). The main text for the class was a book Steve co-authored, highly recommended! The class gave me a pretty firm foundation for creating static sites but I wanted to dive into dynamic sites, so I thought that messing around with Wordpress while tinkering around learning PHP and MySQL would be a good way to go. After some research on Amazon for the best PHP book, I picked up Larry Ullman’s book PHP 6 and MySQL 5. While the internet does have endless amounts of free tutorials, a book really is a good way to go because it gives you a firm foundation of the language. Oh I almost forgot, I need to give a shout out to Oak, for letting me sit in on his Adobe CS3 class at ND so that I could pick up a little on the design side of things. Thanks for bearing with such a design challenged engineering student.
So that is where I am at. Most recently I have been working my way through the book, I just got Wordpress set up on my localhost (tutorial link) so that I can do theme customization. I eventually want the site to look something like this. So I have my work cut out for me. More updates to come…
