Changing times for web developers

Let's say I have a "Student" resource and a "Course" resource. And there's a many-to-many link between Students and Courses. How do I connect them? How do I get a list of the Courses the Student is enrolled in? How do I add to this list? Let's say I want to see a "latest courses" list in my homepage, some of which I'm enrolled in - how do I know which ones? This I solved, for example, by adding a paramater "enrolledIn" to every course, which returns true or false based on the user making the request. New courses I'm enrolled in are added by updating this field (even if the rest of the Course object isn't editable, because I'm not its owner). But is this the correct solution? Is there a better way? I'm not sure.

Let's say I have a Course, which has a "Textbook" resource associated with it (1 to 1). How do I represent this? When getting a Course, should I return the Textbook resource embedded in this? When updating a course, how do I change the Textbook the Course uses? By passing in a new object? Alright, so can I update the Textbook by passing in the same Textbook object to the Course resource, but modifying some of its paramaters?

And lastly, my thorniest problem - modeling fax-inheritance. I wrote this problem on StackOverflow here: .http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13190797/modeling-object-... . Following is a brief explanation (but you should really look at the SO link):

Let's say my system has a "User" resource that has several paramaters like "Name". Let's say my Student, in the database, has a foreign key to the User (it's a 1-1 relationship, but not every User is a Student, of course). Note that Students are the ones that are enrolled in courses, not Users.

How do I model this in my classes? Do I model this as a Student that "Has-a" User object? When I log in, do I keep a copy of my User object? But what if I'm a student and want to do different things if I'm a student? Also, let's say I have comments somewhere in my application. Comments are owned by users. So let's say I get a list of comments, and their authors - do I return a User object? But what if I want to highlight all the comments posted by Students? How do I differentiate?

I think there are still a lot of back-end devs which this very much applies to. If you are a back-end dev who has been able to get away with not knowing CSS (and possibly even JS) well, then you need to fix that deficiency. For example, I typically work with a team of developers where I rarely have to touch CSS issues, but on my own projects, I get a lot of enjoyment on this, maybe because it's just a change.

Client side MVC is overkill in a lot of cases, but when doing client work you will come across these, so this is a good suggestion.

Optimization is something that can get left out if you have a dev team in which nobody picks up that piece. For me, I don't do things the client hasn't authorized payment for me to do and I'm generally busy enough that I hit those paid items and then I'm immediately switching to another project. Often my client is another developer who has pieced together a team. Nobody gets paid to do the optimization, maybe because the main developer is sloppy, lazy, or just doesn't know. It's just one of many details which should be covered but is often left out because of deadlines or a tight budget.

Also I would familiarize myself with pre processed CSS ie. SASS and LESS