WHERE to start and WHAT to learn?

[hack4good]

I've recently gotten into web development and as far as the client side goes it is pretty straight forward to me.
I'm having trouble with the server side programming, but I don't know what language to learn and how the two connect.


An example of what I'm trying to accomplish would be a password protected webpage that would lead to some sort of a link.
I want to know what protocols should be implemented for security purposes as well as how to link the client side of a page with the server.


I understand this topic may have been posted already, and I apologies for repetition, but I can never find anything with the search bar.


Please help,
Hack4Good

[proxx]

May have been posted already? have you heard of that thing called google? i don't think theres a question in your post that wouldnt return at least 10 million hits. the first step to teaching yourself programming/coding is learning how to search/google. Without it you will get nowhere.

Agreed , but if you don't know the search terms to look for it can be rough.
http://www.phpro.org/tutorials/Basic-Login-Authentication-with-PHP-and-MySQL.html
http://hc.apache.org/httpcomponents-client-ga/tutorial/html/authentication.html
Just some random search results ^
I think what you are looking are things in the realm of 'authentication' 'password login' etc.

[DanBlaze]

I'll assume you are asking because you want to get opinions and discuss instead of just reading articles found on google, so here's mine:
Learn PHP (+MySql). There are some other good options, but the main reason I would suggest you get started with PHP is because of two main reasons - there are tons of materials to get you started and PHP hosting is cheap and widespread.
I personally like http://www.w3schools.com/ 's tutorials because they don't get into too much details. But you can easily google some other resources.
Don't use a framework for your first projects. You'll get more experience when working from scratch. The results will not be anything you'd smile at a year later, but if you're starting with no experience in back side programming, it's a lot better this way IMO.


And when you're comfortable with doing simple things like user authentication, database communication and so on, go through the alternatives and decide whether PHP is the language for you.

[hack4good]

Geoff: I had tried to search google for the appropriate terms but I was still lost.


Thank you Proxx and DanBlaze for your replies. I'll definitely look into PHP and MYSQL through the links that you kindly provided.


There are a lot of different languages and databases so I was lost as to which is good for a beginner.