Would anyone be willing to provide me some more information in the area of Web Development?
Wheres the best place to start?
What qualifications required?
Are there any really good books for beginners?
I'm still only fairly young (24) and really do fancy a change.
Thanks for any information!!
J
As someone said above, qualifications depend on the company you go to. I studied for 6 years towards getting my degree, was then told by my first employer after getting my degree that he didn't care if I had a degree or not. Great, thanks, all this debt for nothing. But then other employers since then specified that applicants must have a degree.
I think I may have said it on here before, but I helped my brother-in-law get into web development from his previous job of food and drinks manager at a hotel chain.
I helped him for a while with basic html so that he could build some simple static websites, this gave him a good understanding on structuring the site. I then loaned him a book of mine on Classic ASP (I say loaned, I never got it back
), and he started building an intranet site (basically a website internal to the company) for his hotel, with a lot of advice from me on the way as to why he was getting errors etc. A couple of years later he's working for a web development firm in London, and has doubled his salary.
So my advice would be what someone above said, get yourselves some books or do some research online and build yourself a website, preferably one that's connected to a database of some kind (I'd recommend SQL Server (you can get a free version of this, do a search on google for SQL 2008 Express), though something like Microsoft Access should be sufficient to start with). The books I used were the "SAMS Teach Yourself ?? in 21 Days" kind of books, well structured step by step guides. Once you've built a website or two, you need to get it/them hosted online somewhere (plenty of places online, or drop me a PM as I have a dedicated server myself that I host on), then put the web addresses on your CV so that potential employers can view those websites.
Just remember us on here when you're rich
My brother in law seems to have forgotten how he got where he is, calls occasionally if he wants something, or has had a promotion and wants to show off, but that's about it. He's so full of self importance that he now thinks he can tell me what to do with the dedicated server we share. He even took my name off an online gaming website I built for him years ago, claiming that he had re-written it all (was written in ASP.NET, but for some odd reason he decided it would be a good idea to re-write it in classic ASP). However, was still my design, built on the base of my code, and linked to the database I built. I made sure he put my name straight back on there
(he claimed he took it off in case he'd cocked anything up and didn't want these cockups to be attributed to me
)