You don’t necessarily have to be a wizard at CSS to understand basic concepts and how to use it. I mean, if you can grasp functional programming CSS shouldn’t be very hard to grasp either. You may not have the design aesthete of some UI designers, but there’s nothing that should stop you from being able to leverage some Javascript over some Java or Ruby or Python or PHP.

I think a lot of the hate, especially amongst older programmers, has to do with how rough Javascript has been over the past 12 years. It’s changed dramatically in that time, and the biggest criticism of it, is that it was a loose, flabby language with a lot of power. Which is absolutely true. ES6 is helping reshape that, but, there’s a lot of nuance that happens that helps create more structured programs. It’s less just a library, a tool, and more a way to structure and piece applications together now, and to do that, requires reshaping and restandardizing how to do it.

At the level of a senior full-stack engineer we’re perhaps talking about architecting a modular Backbone/AngularJS front-end whilst optimising content delivery and tweaking hardware accelerated layers in CSS, followed by implementing an async non-blocking backend (which also pre-renders templates on the server), and pushing to an AWS cluster which has been built with security and scaleability in mind. Not to mention design. Designing UI responsively and mobile-first is essential, utilising a CSS pre-processor to save time. And remember to setup Nagios for monitoring. Oh, and ideally when the Continuous Integration server detects a bad build because your end-to-end tests have failed, get it to send you an SMS with the build error messages. Well, the last two are probably for bonus points.

Can you learn both? Yep. I don’t think you should limit yourself if you can help it. Knowing more is never a bad thing. Being good at all, but not a master is an alright place to be in, because you can always dive deeper and learn more, because that is the way of software development.

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PHP is one of the most mature, ubiquitous server-side scripts on the web. Java is a general-purpose, compiled programming language designed with one mantra in mind—”write once, run anywhere.” Both power dynamic web applications and sites, with their own strengths and nuances.

Once you choose a language for your software project, it can be pretty difficult to change gears unless you perform a major overhaul down the line. That’s why choosing the right language up front is imperative to building a scalable, successful site that accomplishes your business goals.

You’ve probably done a little research into the right language, but it can be difficult for someone without software development expertise to determine which one is right. Here’s a look at two of the most popular programming languages, Java and PHP. A software developer can help you best decide between the two based on your project, but here are some basics to help you make the right decision.

What is Java?

Java was designed as a general purpose programming language for building standalone applications. When Java was released by Sun in 1991, it was initially being used to program consumer electronics like VCRs. Java is a compiled language, so when you compile code it’s turned to intermediate binary for the specific operating system running your software. Its applications are compiled into bytecode that can run on implementations of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). The JVM helps bridge the gap between source code and the 1s and 0s that the computer understands. Any machine that has the JVM installed can run Java. In development, Java is primarily a server-side language for the web, and the programming language of choice for mobile development on the Android platform. It also still has a decent presence on the front-end as a Java applet, although this is falling out of favor due to security concerns.

What is PHP?

PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) is a general purpose scripting language that quickly became the de facto server-side language of choice for web developers after its initial release in 1995. It’s got an advantage in that it was designed and created for the web, versus languages that were adapted to the web (like Ruby or Python). Today, a majority of websites run on PHP, and PHP programmers are still in high demand thanks to its role as the foundation for content management systems (CMS) like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla and a number of modern frameworks like Laravel, Symfony, and CakePHP that have accelerated development with this mature language.

PHP and Java Differences

PHP vs. Java: Major Similarities

SHOULD I USE PHP OR JAVA FOR MY NEXT PROJECT?

As with all languages, the choice really boils down to what you’re trying to build and what resources you have at your disposal.

You should consider Java if your project involves…

• Android Apps
• Enterprise Software
• Scientific Computing
• Big Data Analytics
• General Purpose Programming of Hardware
• Server-Side Technologies like Apache, JBoss, Geronimo, GlassFish, etc.

You should consider PHP if your project involves…

• Software stacks like the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)
• CMS’s like WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla etc.
• Servers like MySQL, SQL, MariaDB, Oracle, Sybase, and Postgresql etc.

Both Java and PHP are excellent foundations for a wide variety of software. Which language you choose to use will be determined by what you want developed.

You can manipulate hardware with Java, but it’s not a common language for low-level programming since it’s a “safer” language. Because Java won’t allow you to perform certain functions to protect the PC, it’s preferred for higher level applications.

The best way to make a firm decision is to post your project and ask developers for their opinions. They can tell you which language is right for your project to help guide you to the right solution.

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In case you haven’t heard, Apple just introduced a new language for iOS and OSX developers called Swift. It has come to light that Swift was in the works since 2010, which is 2 years after the first SDK was released. Apple saw the limitations of Objective-C which is almost 30 years old and decided it was time for a change. However, in true Apple fashion, they did not want to release a half-baked language. They realized that no matter the drawbacks of Objective-C, they could still push the envelope with it, and so they did.

It’s been six years since the release of the first SDK and 1.2 million apps have been submitted to the App Store. Millions of developers have suffered through learning the arcane syntax and limitations of Objective-C. Recently, a vocal few decided to speak up expressing their woes about the outdated language.

Swift probably took a little over four years to create and is the result of the work of many smart individuals who love crafting a new language. They looked all around for inspiration and not only created a new language but tools to along with it that would make it easy to learn.

When talking about Swift, Apple refers to three key considerations: Safe, Modern and Powerful. It lives up to all those three things. Outlined below are some of the very basics you need to get up and running with Swift. If you already know a programming language, then you will see a lot of similarities with other modern languages. You might even wonder why they had to invent a whole new language, but that is discussion for another blog post.

Using Swift

Firstly, you will have to download and install Xcode 6. Once you have installed it, open it up and select File from the menu -> New -> Select Source on the left under either iOS or OSX -> Playground. Give your playground a name and you are ready to get started. Alternatively, you could use the REPL (Read Evaluate Print Loop) from the terminal.

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Worth having a think about what type of projects you are interested in and then doing some research into what technologies they use. If you’re keen on developing web based applications, worth checking the courses on PHP and Ruby.

JavaScript is essentially a ‘front end’ or ‘client side’ language. Your browser executes the JavaScript in your webpages on your computer. It can be used to modify HTML and styles on the fly, and also uses a method called AJAX to send and receive data from the server. It makes web pages more engaging, easier to use, and overall can vastly increase the end user experience. Due to fairly recent developments, JavaScript can now also be used as a back end or server side language.

Python, Ruby & PHP are all languages that run on the server. The server processes the code and sends the web pages to your browser, compare this to JavaScript, where the code is sent to your browser, and that code produces or modifies the HTML within your browser itself.

There are ‘code snobs’ who will tell you not to touch PHP, and they have their reasons. It is a relatively easy language to learn, but enables you (encourages you) to write some really horrendous code and use bad practices. For someone who doesn’t know any programming though, writing something very badly that works (because it’s easier to do it badly) will give you a far better start and easier leaning curve than languages that don’t allow that and force a much steeper learning curve or barrier to entry.

Having not used Python or Ruby, I can’t recommend which of the three you mention would be best for a beginner, I’d simply say don’t rule out PHP based upon what some other people may tell you.

So JavaScript, or one of the other three? You don’t need to install any software or have access to a webserver to start writing JavaScript that works, this is a big plus. You can’t do this with any of the other languages. However, JavaScript is focussed on an object oriented paradigm. You won’t know what this means at the moment, but it is essential to understand if you want to write effective software in JavaScript. The other three languages also support object oriented programming, but do not enforce it. Why is this important? In computer software, object oriented programming is a relatively new concept. Before this, we all used a paradigm called procedural programming. You don’t need to know what this means at the moment, but I would say that it is far easier to learn how to write software by using procedural programming techniques, and then later progressing to object oriented techniques (or some combination of both). This will be easier to achieve with the latter three languages than JavaScript.

So my recommendation would be PHP, even with the headache of having to install some local software, or having access to a web server. To build great webpages you will need to know JavaScript at some point, I just wouldn’t recommend it as a starting point. I consider it quite a difficult language to learn compared to PHP.

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Becoming a programmer is a cumulative process that builds up your skills day after day and year after year, and programming can be fun and rewarding (mentally, spiritually and financially). This guide does not promise to give a magically easy way to becoming a programmer, and the ordering of the steps is not sacred, but you’ll get a general outline of how to become a programmer in one of the modern programming fields.

Determine your area of interest: You can start learning with any programming language (though some are definitely “easier” than others), so you’ll want to start by asking yourself what it is you want to accomplish by learning a programming language. This will help you determine what type of programming you should pursue, and provide you a good starting point. If you want to get into web development, you’ll have a whole different set of languages that you’ll need to learn as opposed to developing computer programs. Mobile app developing requires a different skillset than machine programming. All of these decisions will influence your direction.

Regardless of your decision, you may want to consider starting with one of the high-level, simpler languages. These languages are especially useful for beginners, as they teach basic concepts and thought processes that can apply to virtually any language.

• The two most popular languages in this category are Python and Ruby. These are both object-oriented web application languages that use a very readable syntax.
  
• “Object-oriented” means that the language is built around the concepts of “objects”, or collections of data, and their manipulation. This is a concept that is used in many advanced programming languages such as C++, Java, Objective-C, and PHP.

Read a lot of code: Specifically, read a lot of code by excellent programmers. Not just good programmers, like the guy down the hall, but excellent ones. Due to the huge amount of open source today, this is easy to do. When I was learning Java, I read code from the Github. I’ve read lots of good code since.The more experience you have under your belt, the better. I recommend getting involved with an open source project (Github) or volunteering with a local nonprofit organization to write software that helps them out. This will benefit you in the following ways:

• You’ll gain exposure to what it is like building an application to a specification.
  
• You’ll experience the full development lifecycle, including maintenance.
  
• You’ll work as part of a team.
  
• You’ll learn “basic hygiene” practices, such as version control and documentation.
  
• You’ll get a feeling of accomplishment, which will help keep you from getting discouraged.
  
• You’ll be able to list programming experience on your CV.

Learn your tools thoroughly: I think the greatest loss of programming time is not in debugging or rewriting code, but in the innumerable seconds lost here and there by developers who don’t really know their tools. I am referring to: the IDE, the language, the build system, and the VCS. Of these, the IDE and the language are by far the most important. You should, after a few weeks of practice, know almost every keystroke combo in the IDE, so that you touch the mouse only when it saves a lot of keystrokes. If you know the keystrokes, you know the commands. If you use the mouse only, you know only menus on which you tend to click on the same one or two entries. Knowing the IDE is pure discipline.

Plan your code before you write it: I think this is the most difficult item on this list. In exchange, it probably delivers the most benefit. I’m not thinking of formal design — at your stage, that’s unlikely to be necessary. But you do need to plan out the code in some manner other than carrying it around in your head. The simplest approach is to write up a small document What are the requirements for this code? How will you implement it? What do I need to know that I don’t know now? What are the objects I will need or need to create? And write this out. Only then begin to code, you’ll find the code much easier to write, to document, and to get correct. Save your notes — they’re great reference material.

Practice…and practice never give up: While the stack you learn doesn’t matter a whole lot, what does matter is learning by doing. This means dedicating some real time to perfecting your new craft. You must set aside a significant amount of time every day, every week, to learning.You can’t become a software developer after 10 hours of practice. It’s just not possible. Some people say it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert. Now, you don’t need 10,000 hours of practice to get your first software developer job. But you do need to dedicate some serious time.

Find a Community: Finding a community to learn with can make or break your success as a software engineer—especially when you’re just starting out. When you are surrounded by a community of like-minded people, you have an automatic support system: a group of individuals you can call on when you get stuck, or lose motivation. (Both of which can happen to the best of us!).

Build Projects: Don’t just read tutorials and watch videos—put your skills into use. Solve problems along the way, just like everyday software developers do. When you do this, you not only further your learning, you also show potential employers that you can hack it. (Because the end-goal is to get a job, right!?).

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React is often described as “the V in the MVC structure”. This also happens to be the least tangible explanation one could give a newcomer, as (V)iews are typically logic-less files that are driven by a controller. Further, frameworks like Angular, Backbone, Ember, and more already have sufficient view layers — which then begs the question, why do we need to replace the V in MVC with React?

The answer is that this framework doesn’t necessarily want to replace our views — it wants to augment them by allowing you to create highly reusable UI components (tab bars, comment boxes, pop up modals, lists, sortable tables, etc).

In other words, the big idea behind React is this: what if you could create your own HTML element that has customized functionality? For example, one could make a element that would display a textarea, run validations on the text typed into the textarea, submits the form when the enter key is pressed, etc — all just by including one line of code: . (For those of you coming from the Angular world, you can think of React Components as a close analogy to Directives).

Components: The future of web development

However, React is capable of becoming an entire replacement for your views because you can nest components. What is a view, but a large UI component?

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Some of the features are:

• modular packaging system with a dedicated dependency manager
• different ways for accessing relational databases though Routing
• utilities that aid in application deployment and maintenance
• orientation toward syntactic sugar
• easy authentication by providing a simple & easy to use interface and many more.

Server Requirements

This framework has a few system requirements. It’s highly recommended that you use Homestead as your local Laravel development environment. However, if you are not using Homestead, you will need to make sure your server meets the following requirements:

• PHP >= 5.5.9
• OpenSSL PHP Extension
• PDO PHP Extension
• Mbstring PHP Extension
• Tokenizer PHP Extension

Installing Laravel

Laravel utilizes Composer to manage its dependencies. So make sure you have Composer installed on your machine. The best thing about Laravel is that it is a high quality framework, so learning how to use it you become a better programmer in PHP in general. I recommend you to give it a try and you will never regret it.

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The PHP programming language is a server-side HTML embedded scripting language. Let‘s depict the sentence. The PHP language runs on the server-side. This means that the execution (read starting) of the scripts are done on the server where the web-site is hosted. HTML embedded means that you can use programming statements (read a piece of PHP code) from within an HTML code. PHP files are returned to the browser as plain HTML. The last piece of the sentence – scripting language – is a little harder to explain, but we will give it a go. A scripting language is a form of programming language that is usually interpreted rather than compiled. In programming languages such C or C++ you compile the program (permanently) into an executable file, before you can execute the program. A program that is written in a scripting language, is interpreted one command at a time by a command interpreter (Command interpreter is in most cases an executable written in another language (for instance C/C++) than the scripting language.) Some other examples of scripting languages are Perl, Phyton, Java and Ruby.

A last note: scripting languages are also often used by applications as control or configure language. An example: Firefox is written in C/C++ and can be controlled with JavaScript.

Things You Should Know

Because this is an HTML embedded language you should have a basic understanding of HTML/XHTML and (a little) JavaScript.

What is PHP?

• Hypertext Preprocessor.
• As we said before it is a server-side scripting language.
• free and is an open source software product.
• Scripts are executed on the server.
• Supports many databases (MySQL, Sybase, Oracle and many others.)
• Runs on different platforms (Unix, Linux, Windows.)
• Compatible with almost all web-servers used today (Apache, IIS, etc.)
• Contain plain text, HTML tags and scripts
• Files can have one of the following extensions: php, php3 or phtml.

What do you need?

Before you can follow the coming PHP tutorials you need to have the following:

• Access to a web server (like Apache)
• PHP and MySQL should be installed on the web server.

The easiest way is to find a cheap web hosting plan that support PHP and MySQL (most of the web-hosting providers do.) For a couple of bucks a month you can get a virtual host. The advantage is that everything is already installed and that you can share your program (that you are going to write) with the rest of the world. If you don’t want to spend money, you can also install everything on your local machine. The easiest way is to install WAMP if you have a Windows machine and LAMP if you have a Linux machine. (WAMP = Windows Apache MySQL PHP and LAMP = Linux Apache MySQL PHP.) These packages install everything you need. Read the install manual of these packages for instructions. After installation you should have access to http://localhost in your browser.

Literature

PHP.NET: A good place to start is by skimming through the ever-growing list of frequently asked questions (with answers, of course). Then have a look at the rest of the online manual and other resources in the documentation section.

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