Direction/Advice 2

[cainemart]

Please give me some direction! I am a programmer for the accounting department for a corp. I mainly do VBA, Access, and VB but I want to expand my skill set. I like the database programming I do, but I want to get into the visual side as well. So my question is, what should I study up on? Someone suggested I look into learning Photoshop, Dreamweaver but they didn't suggest any good books. And they didn't have any suggestions on what to learn that will feed off my database experience. What I would like to do is reproduce some of my current database applications into applications that use the browser. You might be wondering why... First, our web site sucks ( so bad I won't even mention the name) Second, everything here is about saving money and user time. So I thought I could learn MySql as a free database but haven't figured out what I will really need for the actual client/server side scripting.... And the visual part...

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

mart

 

[Genimuse]

Web applications are effectively (and usually) designed as 3-tier applications.

Database
The back-end tier is the database, where the bulk of the data is stored. Access, MySQL, and SQL Server are all popular databases for internet/intranet applications. If you're written any SQL in your work life then you shouldn't find working with this layer too difficult.

Middleware
The middle tier is where the bulk of the application logic lies (though some may be in triggers or stored procedures in the database, and some may lie on the presentation layer in Javascript, Java, and Flash). Common software used for middleware include Active Server Pages (ASP), PHP, Java Server Pages (JSP), and ColdFusion. One advantage of ASP for you is that you can code the pages in VBScript, preventing you from needing to learn a new language (VBScript is a subset of VB/VBA so you'll need to learn some things but not too much, especially if you've worked with ADO in VB/VBA).

Presentation
The front tier is often referred to as the presentation layer. For web applications the content served by the layer is most commonly HTML (though Flash is growing in popularity as a front-end, and Java is also used in some cases). HTML is often made more effective through the use of client-side Javascript and made easier to use and more compact (and nifty) through the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). All of these things are actually served through the front-end application, the web server. Popular web servers include Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) and Apache. (ASP middleware is built into IIS, so the application technically handles both tiers.)

Your Access experience will help with the back end. If you go with ASP then your VB/VBA experience will help, but it's definitely not free, so you may want to consider PHP (unfortunately PHP is closer to Perl and C than VB, so you will need to learn to think differently when writing some of the code).

On the front end, which you're mostly asking about, you'll need to be creating HTML and graphics, and probably working with CSS and Javascript.

For working with HTML you can go a couple of ways. At one end -- the more programmatic side -- is using pure text editors, including things like Notepad, Notetab, and Visual InterDev. At the other more-visual end are WYSIWYG HTML-creating applications like FrontPage (please don't use it), Adobe's GoLive, and Macromedia's Dreamweaver. The advantages of the programmatic end are that you have complete control over the code and that you learn everything that's going on. The advantages of the visual applications are that -- generally -- they save time and that you don't have to learn nearly as much to get going.

Personally I'm a big fan of Dreamweaver because it generates very good and well-formatted HTML in its visual mode but is also a very good text editor, and you can seamlessly pop back and forth between them (or even use them both at the same time). The code editor does a good job of supporting ASP, JSP, PHP, and ColdFusion. Note thought that I learned by hand-coding everything and then (years) later adopted Dreamweaver to speed things up. Dreamweaver also can generate ASP/JSP/CFM/PHP for you, with "server behaviors" that it inserts. These work fine but are unfortunately somewhat inefficient and don't teach the easiest or necessarily best methods of writing the code by hand. Still, they can get you started while you learn more if you want.

For Javascript and CSS you'll likely use the same editor you used for the HTML. Personally I like the way Dreamweaver handles CSS and it has a number of useful built-in Javascript "behaviors" that automate the more common Javascript uses and generate clean code.

For graphics you'll need decent image editor. Photoshop is the high end (and works very well), but other solid editors include Photoshop Elements (which is plenty for web graphics), Fireworks, and Paint Shop Pro. You'll be creating JPEG and GIF files primarily, which all of these applications can do well.

The best tool of all is studying other web sites, both for learning how to create something that's visually pleasing and easy to use as well as how to create the code for various things -- using View Source in your browser to look at how certain things work is the worst-kept "secret" of every web designer.

Hope this gets you started.

 

[cainemart]

Thanks for replying with all of the useful info.