Ask YC: Learning Web Development, were should I start?

Something like Django or Ruby on Rails would be a good platform. "Unfortunately" it hides a lot from you so you won't get to see what's actually going on. Maybe try writing a few CGI's just to see what's physically happening to get a feel for that aspect of things.

Join to some opensource project at sourceforge.net

Pylons and CakePHP are also quite good frameworks, if you're into that kind of thing, but I'd also suggest writing something simple in PHP (which is pretty much still the webdev language these days),

I had a similar issue a year or so ago. I tried to jump right in to a web framework, but I ran into a few problems. Like so much in the technology world, web frameworks grew in response to a certain set of problems. If you dive into web frameworks without having a least a rudimentary understanding of the problems that are being solved, you'll end up puzzled more often than not. So, when I picked up a bunch of Rails books, and started to work through them. So much of it was confounding, because so much of Rails is developed in response to problems in PHP + Java web development.

You could just say, "Screw it all," pick up a PHP book and dive in head first. You'll pick up some pretty bad habits along the way, but it depends on how you like to learn.

Here's a syllabus that I'd suggest to really get your head around web programming and understand what's going on:

HTTP--learn the basics of what the protocol does, and why. Learn the different response pages, because they are going to be your error messages.

Web servers--you just need a 100 ft overview. Learn how to setup and configure a web server.

Programming--You need to pick a language, Python or Ruby and learn how to at least do some basic programming with it. I'd recommend Python, personally. It's more explicit, and has less "magic". You probably need to understand variables, iteration or looping. You need to understand some basics of the object oriented programming concepts like methods, classes and scoping. And, if you're going to get into any of the web frameworks, you need to understand what things like a dictionary and array are. At least a basic understanding of regular expressions are necessary to learn Django's URL naming convention. The better you know programming itself, the better web developer you'll be, and more things will become possible for you to program.

CGI -- This is the ancestor to pretty much all dynamic web pages, and the foundation of most web development. Pick the language that you're learning, and go through some tutorials on CGI scripting for the language you're going to focus on. And, this will help you understand the basics of what goes on in the address bar, GET and POST methods of the HTTP protocol. You'll also get familiar with the idea of taking variables and inserting them into HTML templates dynamically, which is the basis of most web frameworks.

Learn SQL, and database basics. You need to understand what a database is, how to create a database, why databases are important, how to create and drop tables, how to do queries, etc... Having at least a basic understanding of relationships, foreign keys and constraints is helpful when reading some of the web framework documentation. You really should understand how to do a query in SQL, just so you can understand what the web framework is doing for you.

Finally, pick up a web framework, and start to work through it. After learning the above, learning the web framework will tend to make a lot more sense than if you dive into a web framework deep end first. Pick the framework that's most popular for your language, that way, you can be assured you will have plenty of documentation to work with. I'd recommend Django for Python, and Rails for Ruby.

Lather, rinse, repeat. Iterate through the above steps, and learn more and more each time you approach each subject.

Thanks a lot, you really understood my problem :) I don't want to learn PHP, now I have to decide if it's going to be Python or Ruby.

Can you please point me some of the information sources you used.

Thanks again.