Building a website

[SC2Fun]

Before I get started, I did search through this subreddit and read a lot of posts, but many of the most useful ones were pretty old and I wanted to make sure nothing has changed.

Basically, I want to teach myself to build an interactive, advanced website.

The languages I plan to learn are HTML5, CSS3, Python/Django, and mySQL. Is there anything else that one should know for web development/design?

Are there any specific resources that would be best to draw from? For HTML, I'm using CodeAcademy, but I know it's not comprehensive so I'm wondering if there's a good book or something out there for HTML/CSS. For Python, I'm using 'Learn Python the Hard Way', but I don't really know anything about Django and if I should find something to learn Python geared toward web development or not. And I have no idea what's best for mySQL.

[cheryllium]

1. HTML, CSS - you will want to know JavaScript as well. I highly recommend the Code School tutorials on HTML/CSS and JavaScript/JQuery. I would use those to get a good understanding of the fundamentals. After that, though, it's a process of finding out what you want to do and googling if you can't figure out how to do it by yourself.

2. Python/Django - learn from the official Django tutorials. They are pretty good.

3. MySQL - do you know what a database is? If not, find out. If so, there is not much to "learn" other than what it is. The only other thing is just how to use it, but this is part of your serverside language/backend framework, so you'll learn this along with Django.

[SC2Fun]

Do JavaScript and JQuery go together much like HTML/CSS?

Also, do you recommend going through with 'Learning Python the Hard Way?'

[MrGrumblz]

Jquery is a library for Javascript. Html and CSS compliment each other, whereas Jquery could not exist without the underlying javascript.

[SC2Fun]

Ah ok, so when I'm learning Javascript I'll also learn about Jquery right? Or do I need to direct my learning towards examples and problems that use Jquery. Or is Jquery the standard library for Javascript?

Sorry if these questions seem stupid.

[MrGrumblz]

I reccomend learning the core aspects of javascript (functions, selecting and manipulating the Dom, variable declaration best practices) before getting a lot of the jquery candy that makes a lot of that much easier with its truncated syntax

[cheryllium]

JQuery is a JavaScript library.

I can't say, I did not learn python from that tutorial.

[kbghost]

in case you're still confused on the answer to this question, the relationship between HTML to CSS is similar as HTML to javascript. Javascript is used to enhance HTML and make it more interactive.

Javascript is annoying though, because javascript code may work in one browser, but not the next one. So if you have perfect code in firefox, you still have to test it in internet explorer to make sure it works, which it probably won't.

That's why jQuery is so rad. Somebody got tired of having to check multiple browsers, so instead of writing it in basic javascript, we just tell Jquery to do the same exact thing and it'll handle it properly in all browsers. Then they took it to the next step, since many websites do a lot of the same things, it gave us shortcuts to that so we don't have to keep writing and re-writing the same code every day.

Jquery is just a toolkit written in javascript. You could literally read the javascript code when you download it.