The hard facts: what languages web developers should learn

Thursday, May 6th, 2010

When I first started learning programming, choices were limited to machine code or a version of BASIC. But then I am ancient.

In many ways, the newcomer to programming who’s aiming at web or mobile development has a much better time of it today. This is because whilst there are many, many languages to choose from, they have much more in common than languages of the past. Learn ActionScript, for example, and you’re half way there with C#, PHP and JavaScript, as their basic constructs are identical.

But the real value you, as a web developer, can bring to a project is specialist skill. Whilst every good PHP developer understands the basics of C#, no web project can be completed without in-depth knowledge, and this takes time and lots and lots of practice to develop. It’s a huge investment so the choice of which language to specialise in is also critical, at least in the short- to medium-term. (more…)

The joy of interfacing

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

So anyway, get yourself into your time machine and set it for sometime around 1986. Once you get there, pop on your invisibility cloak, find someone who looks spoddy and follow them into the dining room. See that BBC Micro in the corner? Pop over and give the top a quick tug. Chances are it’s not screwed down.

That’s because, in the old days, computers were for hobbyists with soldering irons, and they were forever taking the tops off to install new circuit boards they’d made.

Doesn’t happen much anymore, of course – you might pop the side off once a year to install a new graphics card, but most people wouldn’t consider actually building new hardware to go inside their computer. And for very good reason: the insides of a modern PC are massively more complex and to build an add-on part yourself that would actually be any use is more or less impossible.

Thing is though, designing and connecting your own hardware to a PC, while unlikely to win you admiring glances from the opposite sex, is bloody good fun. Fact. I’ve been tinkering with the whole area again for the past year or so – for reasons I may document at some point – and it turns out that there’s a massive array of components that are relatively easy to interface to a PC and do interesting things with. (more…)