3 books to learn the professional web

Building, expressing, inventing, facilitating

1. HTML & CSS
2. PHP & MySQL
3. JavaScript & jQuery

What do Facebook, Google Docs and Lafeltrinelli.it have in common?

They are websites. Whatever their appearance or the commands they offer, they are all based on the same technologies, those that allow owners of a browser to read, write, buy, sell, publish, share, comment using text, images, sounds.

Knowing how to build compatible, functional and pleasant to use websites is a skill that is literally worth its weight in gold today and is not only useful to those who actually do it; social media marketers, journalists, bloggers, enthusiasts, students have every interest in understanding how the mechanism works and perhaps knowing how to get involved, even if they don’t develop.

To know how to build websites suited to our time, we need to organize ourselves, prioritize, take one step at a time, face a new difficulty only after having resolved the previous one. Jon Duckett wrote a trilogy of texts to learn how to build the web exactly this way and has become a legend of technical publishing. Maybe they might interest you.

This book is aimed at programmers and developers but also at designers, bloggers, editors and content and marketing managers who work on individual parts or entire websites. Zero programming experience required.

HTML for building blocks, to build a structure where it is clear what each piece is. This is a title, this is a table, here is a photo. CSS to define all the graphic and typographical aspects of the structure itself: I want it green, rotated thirty-eight degrees and with a shadow behind it.

Whatever we see through the browser (and these days even through an app with Internet access) starts here.

HTML & CSS accompanies those who want to learn on an orderly and gradual path, which starts from the essential and leads to everything that is convenient for designing and creating a web page that satisfies the user, makes those who publish it proud and is more easily found by the engines search engine like Google.

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This book is for those who are new to the PHP language, the MySQL database system, and server-side web programming. The goal is to create dynamic pages and websites by understanding the underlying logic and necessary technologies.

Do you frequent Facebook or any other social network? Do you consult news sites? These examples and many others have in common the dynamicity: the web pages we see are generated on the fly, thanks to an engine that selects content from a database and layouts it to respond to our request to browse.

PHP is the most used programming language in the world in these situations and MySQL is a system for telling a database inside a server what exactly we need to create the page we want.

PHP & MySQL offers clear and well-organized examples to perfectly understand what it means to build a site with a database behind it. Knowledge that tomorrow can help a school, a sports club, an association, a shop, a professional studio… you don’t need to have three billion members to enjoy the advantages of PHP.

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Page after page the reader discovers how JavaScript works, how to customize scripts and how to create them from scratch, but also learns to exploit the potential of jQuery and the most popular development techniques to improve the interactivity and usability of websites.

Have you ever used Google Docs or Gmail? They open with a browser, so they are websites; but we can write on it, move objects, change the appearance of the page itself.

This is achieved by mastering JavaScript, a programming language created to live inside web pages. JavaScript is the most requested skill on the programming market today.

JavaScript & jQuery it allows you to understand JavaScript one piece at a time, along with the other ingredients that allow you to arrive at an interactive web page. All the skill required to get started is a foundation of HTML and CSS.

Go back to the beginning.

Original opening image by the Apogeonline editorial team..