This is an article that I wrote a few years ago that still applies today. It sounds very specific to Java, but it’s something you need to watch out for in any language. Working with decimal numbers can be more complicated than it might seem. Many a Java programmer has been bitten by using doubles when calculating currency or another decimal value that relies on precision. The problem Let’s say that we need to calculate a customer’s bill.

I’ve always been a little more tenacious than most people I know, willing to spend the time to flail before making the breakthrough that gets the results I’m looking for.1 I think part of that has to do with the fact that I do most of the flailing in private, at a computer where no one can point out my failures or see what I’m working on before it’s ready. But as I’ve taught other people programming over the years, I’m always surprised at how quickly they throw in the towel on problems that I know are solvable.

I want to learn web development. but i’m stuck in choosing the language (PHP or Ruby). I heard about Laravel I think it is interesting and I also heard that it is same as Rails. So I think which will be a better choice to learn Laravel or Rails framework and which has a bright future? Thank you so much for your question. I want to start my answer by saying that I can’t give you a definite answer, but you also shouldn’t be stuck on this.

I recently got an email from one of my tutoring students about how he had finished setting up an e-commerce site for his Dad’s salsa business, which was a pretty big accomplishment. But there were two things in the email that I took issue with. One was that he thought it was weird that another web dev shop had asked for $3,000 to set up a shopping cart in Spotify and the other was that he felt that using an off the shelf solution (BigCommerce) was a cop out and he should have been able to build it himself.

When it comes to web application security, there are a class of things that every web developer should know. Trust me, you need to learn these and you’ll use them on every project you do. Interviewers ask about this stuff, so learn about them and how to handle them in whatever language you’re using. SSL - Secure Sockets Layer This is one of the basic building blocks of the modern web.

Welcome to Ask Away where I answer some of the questions sent to me or found on the web. Today’s question comes from a comment on one of my Reddit threads that I answered recently about language selection for high performance: NakedHowler: I’m thinking about creating an app that hopefully one day will have tons of people using it. My problem is should I learn Python and Django or just stick with PHP and advance further to learn Laravel?

Welcome to “How It Started”, a feature where I talk about how different sites around the internet were built to give an idea of what’s involved in a real world web application. I hope to illustrate that some of the biggest websites today had very humble beginnings that are achievable by learning the basics of web development. Ravelry The first site I want to look at is Ravelry, an online knitting and crocheting community site where users can share and track projects they’re working on and talk about different topics of interest with others in the community.

Welcome to Ask Away where I answer some of the questions sent to me or found on the web. Today’s question comes from a Reddit thread that I answered recently about mobile development: problemod: If a student or non-degree beginner takes a year and a half or so (or however long it takes to learn to build an app from scratch) to create a quality native app, will the skills be transferable if he/she wanted to work in web development (filling in holes in knowledge like HTML/CSS/JAVASCRIPT etc…)?

I’ve seen a lot of posts on /r/learnprogramming and other places wondering how to get started with web programming. I’ve been doing this for about 15 years now and I’m here to give you some good news. Everything that I’ve done, from bill pay sites for Fortune 100 companies to lead tracking applications for small businesses, is essentially based on one simple concept and that’s CRUD. CRUDdy Applications In the computer world, CRUD stands for Create, Read, Update, Delete, which describes the four basic actions that most web applications need to do.

Having been in web development for over 15 years, I’ve had to learn a lot of new technologies. When I started, JavaScript was something you avoided and no one had heard of CSS. Now, you’re nothing it you don’t know both of those like the back of your hand. Things change fast on the internet and you better be able to learn programming quickly. Most of that was on the job training and that means picking things up enough to be productive now.