[thelist] Overwhelm: Need a course correction.

[Frank]

Oh man, I took a three year break from coding, and now that I get 
back to it I'm feeling overwhelmed. The standards that one has to 
meet is just incredible.

Now I'm learning OOP in CF, I have to pick up whole new levels of 
security at the server level, app level, javascript level, 
internationalisation, frameworks, accessibility and foreign 
government standards, upgrades to CSS (which thankfully aren't out 
yet), AJAX, dozens of libraries to choose from if I don't learn it 
from scratch (and if I don't know it  from scratch, am I really a 
good developer?), web services, XML/XSS, JSON, Alphabet soup of 
really intimidating sounding technologies, dealing with a dozen APIs, 
whole new editing environments (when I started, there were two 
"environments" vii and BBEdit). I love CFEclipse, and I'm still 
trying to ride that whole-herd-in-one horse, FLEX, and about 17.2 
gazillion other really important  sounding things. Coldfusion  is 
three times the animal that I knew. Heck, even the little MySql that 
could has grown into a beast to tangle with.

Sweet Mary! Where does one start? Don't get me wrong. On one hand, 
it's totally exciting, and interesting, on the other hand, it's like 
trying to drink from a fire hose.

If you were to prioritise the basic skills that a Coldfusion coder 
needs to master, or at least get a handle on, in order of importance 
to make it back to the level that one would call "high/upper echelon 
coder" what would you study in what order (with the understanding 
that it's always a bit of a mix).? If you were to design a "General 
Web Development Curriculum for the Aspiring Professional" what would it be?

If you were to choose the top 10 important technologies to be a 
respectable high end developer, and rank the technologies in order of 
importance, what would they be?



Frank Marion     lists at frankmarion.com      Keep the signal high.