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General Discussion

Posted by rodian
rodian
3,637 Points

General Advice about the best track to follow

I am new to programming and web development but have a specific goal on the type of website I would like to create. I was hoping that someone could provide some advice on the best path to go. The website I am hoping to create would collect data from a government website based on specific HTML tags, store the data in some kind of database that would allow me to analyze the data using a few algorithms and then display the cleaned up and analyzed data on a website for discussion. The most important and challenging part of this exercise is on the backend, collecting the data and writing algorithms to analyze the data - since I'm not to concerned on how it looks for the moment. I figure I would try to learn Python and do the programming in that language, but before doing that, I believe it is important to gain some background in SQL, HTML and CSS.

I know this is kind of a big project for my first website - but it's where my interest lie and I probably would not be motivated enough to learn any of this stuff if I was just going to create a blog or a basic ecommerce site. I am looking for some direction on where to focus my energy and to help get up the learning curve faster.

Thanks in advance for your comments.

4 Answers

Carlos Rojas "Yoru No Tori"
Carlos Rojas "Yoru No Tori"
6,530 Points
Carlos Rojas "Yoru No Tori"
Carlos Rojas "Yoru No Tori"
6,530 Points

Hello there Joel, my name is Carlos, I am a system engineer with a degree in graphic design, I think I feel the same many times about learning more and aplying my knowledge the best I can, but as your first webpage, I will sugget you to start looking at frontend web design, as you gain more experience, then you could try to know better what´s going on behind that scene, try to master in all the basic stuff, don´t feel impatience about knowing everything as fast as you can, be patience and practice everything you learn here not only with the treehouse exercices, try to create your own stuff in many different ways with what you learn here in tree house.

the best track for a beginner as I see here, would be https://teamtreehouse.com/tracks/web-design the web design track, then you could just start thinking about PHP, RUBY, PYTHON and so on.

I hope my advice could give you some help, have a great day Joel

Matthew Rigdon
Matthew Rigdon
8,223 Points
Matthew Rigdon
Matthew Rigdon
8,223 Points

Based on your goals, you are going to have to learn the following:

  • HTML
  • CSS
  • SQL (database structures and T-SQL commands)
  • Backend language (C#, Python, RUBY, etc.)

Now how much time you spend on each of these depends on how good you want this site to look. I would suggest the following courses:

  • Front-End Web
  • Basic SQL
  • Python, RUBY, or PHP (C# isn't discussed in depth enough on this site)

With the complexity of the website you want to make, I would suggest spending your time as follows:

  • Front-End Web (25%)
  • SQL (35%)
  • Backend Language (40%)

By far the most difficult part of what you want to do is using SQL with a backend language. Pulling data from a web page, making identifiers in SQL, the SQL schema structure, etc. is fairly complex. I would suggest breaking this down into more manageable steps for the time being:

  1. Design a basic site that you could use
  2. Find out how to take data from a website using a web parser
  3. Find a way to store that parsed data (SIMPLE) in a SQL table
  4. Find a way to display this data from SQL tables onto your webpage
  5. Make it look decent using CSS

Once you can do this simplified website, build the real one.

Neil Anuskiewicz
Neil Anuskiewicz
11,007 Points

Mathew, I'm in the Frontend Track, so when you have a hammer perhaps everything looks like a nail. But could he do what he wants with HTML/CSS/JavaScript with Node for the backend part? Of course, there's the database queries. I'm not far enough along in my JavaScript knowledge to know how well JavaScript plays with SQL? I'm going to assume that anything that makes inroads on the backend (e.g., Node) has got to have the facility to talk to databases, which is essentially the project the OP mentions, a database with a nice interface. Right?

rodian
rodian
3,637 Points

Carlos and Mathew, I appreciate the response. I started with basic HTML and CSS and it looks like I made the right choice. Thanks for the help. I don't know if Neil's suggestion about using NODE would work for what I aim to do, I may need a programming language. One follow up question if you don't mind. You mentioned that coding with SQL language is challenging - I am wondering if there is one programming language that might be more friendly with SQL than another? I was thinking PHP because based on what I read, it might be a little easier to learn and I understand that many websites use it.

Matthew Rigdon
Matthew Rigdon
8,223 Points

Joel Musante I wouldn't say that the SQL language is difficult, but storing data and creating a table system that works for what you want could be, depending on how complex the data is that you are storing. I imagine that Python, C#, PHP, etc. can all get the job done. I would suggest going with the language that you like the most or is most familiar to you. Most of my background is in C# or Python, so I would choose one of those two.

Neil Anuskiewicz I'm not very familiar with Node, but typically, using a language like JavaScript (which runs on the client-side) seems like it could be asking for a security issue. Information stored in a database is usually highly confidential, so you would want to minimize the risk of someone accessing the DB in a way that you haven't intended. See: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/857670/how-to-connect-to-sql-server-database-from-javascript

Carlos Rojas "Yoru No Tori"
Carlos Rojas "Yoru No Tori"
6,530 Points
Carlos Rojas "Yoru No Tori"
Carlos Rojas "Yoru No Tori"
6,530 Points

Don´t be afraid in working with SQL Joel, it would be as complex as you want, I mean, there is a big difference in programming a full query in pure transact (that for now would be your homework if you want, go and search what does transact language mean, but don´t get involve too much with it before finishing what the basics from html are right now) and asking for data with a back-end program language, I don´t want to spoil the party, I am a teacher in a technological institute too here in my country, so my best advice even to my students is to take it easy, don´t jump from one step to another, its awesome that you read and learn abour many subjects right now but as soon as you finish your html and css basics you will notice that tree house teachers would guide you through your appropriate next steps.

Have a great week learning Joel

Dylan Aresu
Dylan Aresu
9,687 Points
Dylan Aresu
Dylan Aresu
9,687 Points

FRONT END WEB DEVELOPMENT definitely. It covers the basics on everything about web design and provides a necessary fundamental basis of programming syntax which will apply to all sorts of coding you may wish to learn in the future.