About the Site | How I Learned | Screenshots

How I Learned to Write Code A number of resources helped me a great deal in learning how to code. My HTML basics came from a little Quickstudy guide, not a website, but I'm sure you can find a good HTML tutorial online just about anywhere. Just Google "HTML tutorial", and you'll get tons. As for the JavaScript, I started with Thau's Javascript Tutorial. The tutorial is pretty easy to follow, and very helpful. Anyone just starting out with JavaScript code should definitely begin here. This tutorial will take you through mouseovers, alert boxes, how to open and close windows, and a bunch of other stuff. I only use a little bit of what I learned there on this site, but there's plenty to be absorbed. And then there's Perl. For this, I learned from John Callendar's tutorial. I'm not sure where I downloaded this from, but I've posted the .zip file here for anyone to download (once you unzip it, it's all done as html files which you can view in any browser). This tutorial shows you the basics, and has some code for a basic form-to-email gateway, and code for a guestbook. My comments function was the first CGI script that I wrote, and I basically figured out how to use the commands that he used in his guestbook script, combined them with some JavaScript, and voila, I had comments (I didn't copy and paste his code, I just used it to learn how to do what I needed to do). I've used a little bit of CSS on this site. Some of that I stole from Jess's site, but I still had to learn how to implement it. For that I used this site, though I'm not quite sure just who puts it together. It's got some really good information on Cascading Style Sheets, and should get anyone started. Lastly, I looked at lots of source code from other sites. I cannot stress enough the importance of reading other people's source to the beginning programmer. The tutorials will give you enough of a basis in the languages to get started, but that's only the beginning. The next step is to use what you learn from the tutorials to make some sense out of other people's code that you've never seen before, and figure it out. I hope these resources prove useful to someone. I have absolutely loved building my site, despite the weeping and gnashing of teeth it sometimes caused (especially with JavaScript and Perl). Anyone really can do this; it takes some time and patience, but once you've got it, you'll find the ability to create websites from scratch is infinitely useful. Good luck!