My Web Development Roadmap

Having completed my Head First HTML book a couple of weeks ago, I started having a play around with some HTML and building a little test site. At the same time I began to sketch out some ideas for the kind of websites that I would ultimately like to build. I have several ideas and most of them have several features in common:

• They'll be database driven in some way
• Most will require a secure login system
• I'll want a nice Ajax front end

I already have a book on Ajax and its after starting that book that I realised I would need to take a step back and brush up on my HTML and learn a little Javascript too. So my initial plan was to study HTML, then Javascript and then move onto Ajax.

However, after pondering my above list I realised that all of my sites needed to be dynamic. They would all need to be database driven but I could cope without Ajax to start with. So this has changed things a bit. As much as I've like to play with the cool features of Ajax, I am more concerned with getting something functional up and running quickly so I had to find out a little about database driven websites.

After a little digging there seemed to be two popular paths that stood out - the Php / MySql one, and the ASP.NET / Sql Server one. They seemed to be biased towards *nix / Windows respectively though in the case of Php / MySql they can also be run on Windows servers. I don't know any of those technologies though I am a C# developer by day so I'm pretty sure that ASP.NET is going to be easier for me to pick up than Php. For that reason alone I went for that route.

I've now bought the Wrox book Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 with C# and I'm working my way through it. I'm feeling a little frustrated at the moment as I realise that I can't really do much yet - it's all just study. Hopefully I'll get to a point where it will all start to click and I can really get moving on something.