On With It!
Let’s not make a big hullabaloo about this being the first blog post. I’m itching to get down to business.
A friend and neighbor of mine is in middle of her quest for a Graphic Communications degree from Cal Poly. I asked her if she’d done much in the way of Web Development. Of course not. Her classes only used a pinch of Dreamweaver and taught some rudimentary CSS. She did, however, believe this would be a valuable skill to learn, so I agreed to do some teaching. Yes! I have an apprentice!
Just to instantly digress on my first post, school curriculum is a joke. The process of accreditation for Computer Science, and I assume other majors as well, takes a few years. Also, at least for Cal Poly, students are regularly taking 5+ years to graduate. When you consider that a student can graduate under any catalog that is released while they attend the University, and many graduate under the same one released their freshman year, seniors are taking classes that were decided to be pertinent 8-10 years prior. Can you imagine sitting around in 1999 thinking about what a programmer, let alone a web developer, would need to know today?
Just don’t count on school to teach you what you need to know. A little passion to learn independently is required.
Anyways, I figured if I'm going to teach my minion apprentice a few things, I might as well share what comes of it with whoever wanders by. Here is a list of topics I plan to cover. This is almost certainly going to change, and each “lesson” will build upon the others and discuss more advanced topics. My aim is to cover the essentials needed for the modern front-end web developer. If you have any suggestions for further must-have lessons, please comment.
- Separation Of Layers: Content, Style, And Behavior
- Web Standards?
- Standards Compliant Markup
- Introduction To CSS
- CSS Layouts
- Advanced CSS Techniques
- Introductory Javascript
- Graceful Degradation
- Web Accessibility
- Javascript Frameworks
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Progressive Enhancement With CSS3
- Browser Targeting And Quirks
- Server Side Languages
I hope to someday possess even a portion of your knowledge, oh great crab master. With CSS as my staff and curiosity my spirit, I shall conquer Mt. Webdevelopment with the guidance of Sir.Troughton.
In loyal servitude,
your cohort and disciple, Nisse