I read a post on how a developer went from being a noob web developer to a competant one. He works for a cool company. So I gave his opinions a little more authority. I would like to dabble in web development myself. Let's see where I am compared to this guy, and where I need to go.He started by playing with URL parameters. Got it. Then he went tinto JavaScript. I am working on that. This is where my experience ends. The developer I read about went much further. He them learned an Object Relational Mapper. And he really pumps up learning jQuery, which is a JavaScript library for client scripting. I got a feeling I need to learn that next myself.
The guy said he got into FireBug, which is a tool to help debug all things web. He learned Memcached, which implements an in memory cache to speed up dynamic sites that depend on a database. He seems to be a Python developer now. He learned Python requests, which is an HTTP library written in the Python programming language.
The developer used Beautiful Soup, which is a python library for things like screen scraping. That seems a bit speciic. He also got deep into Cascading Style Sheets. I know a little bit about them. Then he mentioned that he turned his study to cookies. Isn't that a basic capability you need to know earlier?
Boss got into MongoDB, an open source NoSQL database. Today I learned that the Mongo comes from the work huMongous. He also uses DictShield, which claims to be a modeling system that is not tied to a specific database. Not exactly sure what that does. It seems to be relating to typing. Finally he got into the Python Natural Language Processing Toolkit. This also seems to be a niche.
The moral of the story is that there is a lot to becoming a web developer. Just when you think you learned a bit, you find out there is oh so much more to learn.
