thebeebs | About the Book

About the Book

This book has a simple aim... to teach you everything you will need to know so that you can stop being a web designer and start being a web developer. It's the ideal book for the kind of person that knows a bit about websites - who may have even put together a few - but considers the programming side of web development a black art.

Allow me to let you into a secret: Programming isn't as hard as programmers like to make out and only really requires 3 core abilities:

  1. To be curious obsessive about how things work
  2. To identify problems
  3. To creatively fix problems.

I'm not an idiot, I recognise that to be a programmer you need to know,  a programming language. It is, however, crucial to realise that knowing the syntax of a language doesn’t  make you a programmer; if it did then the compiler would be able to write the code for you.

To be obsessive about how things work

Having a curiosity about how things works is a useful trait as it will provide you with the enthusiasm and drive to actually become good. If you're not bothered by how a website actually mange's to process 1 million orders an hour then programming will bore you.

Programming is an obsession for me, I think about it more than almost anything else. I have a drive to find solutions to problems and I get a "Master of the Universe" Kick out of finding a solution. Now, I can only speak from personal experience, but almost everybody I admire in the development community has this same drive and enthusiasm for Elegant Beautiful code (oh yes code can be beautiful). I nearly said sexy code, but I once heard a chef describe his food as sexy and it kind of didn't make me want to eat his food, who knows what he did with that "coc au vin" behind closed doors.

To identify problems

By Identifying problems I don't mean finding bugs I mean being able to looks at a situation in the real world and seeing the floors. When a client comes to you with a problem they understand the direct problem but they may not be able to spot the real underlying cause of the problem. If you can't identify a problem then you won't be able to fix it.

To creatively fix problems.

Programming may appear on the surface to be a science, but solving problems is an art and Art requires creativity; again one of the reasons that computers can't program themselves is they're not that great at thinking creatively. The solution to a problem may require very radical or as some socially retarded marketers may call it "Out of the box thinking".

In my opinion creativity and problem identification can be taught but the obsessiveness can't be... if you’re not interested to know how MySpace.com manages to handle 1.5 billion page views a day then you probably don't really want to keep reading this book.