how to dive into web programming

I'm just starting to get serious about web programming, and I've done a decent amount of research about how to master it. I quickly articulated this advice in an email to a friend, and I thought I'd post it here:


Her question:

From: AM
To: Sam Odio
Subject: hi i'm curious..

Hi,

I saw that you're doing SCIP - so then I looked up what a functional programming language was, and according to wikipedia functional languages "have largely been emphasized in academia rather than in commercial software development." But it notes that you can use it for commercial use as well. So are you doing it just to learn or is to serve some future practical purpose?

I was just wondering b/c I always want to know what the best language to learn is (not that I have much of an intention of learning any sort of functional programming after getting extremely confused by your progress tracking on bluwiki) and I also know that this is all based largely on personal preference, but i'm still curious....

AM.

My response:

From: Sam Odio
To: AM
Subject: Re: hi i'm curious..

my suggestion:

1) learn an object oriented language & framework (I'm doing pything w/ djano, you can also do ruby/rails or php/symfony)
2) learn functional programming w/ SICP if you want to get good (CLisp, scheme, arc)

#2 will take a lot of time, and yield few direct results. But it'll help you understand what is capable w/ programming. Long-term results, not short-term. If you want ONLY short-term results, learn php/symfony. PHP is not completely object oriented, but quick & dirty.

-s

What does everyone think? did I give her the right advice?

Foxfield: a time to party, drink, and... program?

Today is April 29th, the day of the annual Foxfield Races. The races are a venerable UVa tradition when just about everyone takes time out of their rigorous schedules to convene on a field, party, get drunk and do crazy things, like getting paid for jumping in a trough full of piss (foxfield's "bathroom").

Having stayed up till 4 yesterday, I couldn't wake up in time to leave for the races this morning (everyone got up @ 7). Since I wasn't really looking forward to going anyways, I decided not to meet up with them there and instead do some programming in Rails.

So I'm programming in my backyard on my laptop and all these drunk students walk are walking home after the races. I have my ruby on rails book out, and this guy comes up and reads the title, and then exclaims "HEY! 3 Dollar Rails!" I replied with an "uh, yah... you got it."

Its times like that which make me realize how out of place I am, cause at that moment I realized the word "rails" means something entirely different than to the majority of the UVa population. When they hear it, they think cheap drinks; when I hear it, I think a cool programming tool. Guess that makes me a geek.

Ruby on Rails

If you haven't started using Ruby on Rails, you need to.

Although I still haven't mastered it, I have been absolutely AMAZED at how powerful it is. A couple vids to whet your appetite:

- creating a blog with ruby on rails in 15 mins
- ruby on rails web interface to flickr


I know this is old news for all you programming geeks out there, but just entertain me.