David Scott Tufts » Getting Started http://www.davidscotttufts.com Husband, Father of Six, and Web Developer Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:26:33 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Everything a Web Developer Needs to Get Started http://www.davidscotttufts.com/2009/04/10/everything-a-web-developer-needs-to-get-started/ http://www.davidscotttufts.com/2009/04/10/everything-a-web-developer-needs-to-get-started/#comments Fri, 10 Apr 2009 19:10:45 +0000 David Scott Tufts http://www.davidscotttufts.com/?p=66 Ever consider Web Development as a career? The following list of free resources will help you get up-and-running as a Web Developer.

PHP – Currently the most popular and widely used web development platform in the world.  After starting my software/web development career several years ago in the world of Microsoft, it was a relief to see that there was a simple solution out there that made far more sense (and was free).  PHP is also the “P” in LAMP, which is an acronym for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP – a combination of technologies forming an open source development environment.
XAMPP – Configuring a web development environment couldn’t be easier, with XAMPP a development server can be up and running within a half hour instead of several hours.  It installs and configures PHP, MySQL, and Apache on your operating system.
PSPad – There are many great text editors out there, I just happen to prefer PSPad.
FireFox – A browser that can be extended by installing web developer friendly plugins, here are my favorites:

  • Firebug – Allows you to edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page
  • Web Developer Toolbar – Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools
  • MeasureIt – Draw out a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any elements on a webpage
  • ColorZilla – Advanced eyedropper, color picker, page zoomer and more
  • HTML Validator – Adds HTML validation inside Firefox
  • Operator – Finds microformats and other semantic data that are on many web pages
  • ScreenGrab – Captures an image of what you can see in the window, the entire page, just a selection
  • YSlow – Analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on Yahoo’s high performance rules

jQuery – A JavaScript library and AJAX utility.
Wordpress and WordPress MU – Blogging tools and CMS publishing platforms. (not just for blogs anymore)
TinyMCE – A JavaScript WYSIWYG editor for content entry on your websites.
phpMailer – An advanced PHP class for sending emails from your web applications.
SWFUploader – A multi-file flash uploading tool for your website.
Silk Icons – 1000 free web icons.
Gimp – A free image editing tool which is a great alternative to Adobe’s Photoshop.

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