[thelist] how did you learn?

[Stephen Rider]

On Jun 29, 2004, at 12:40 AM, Paul Bennett wrote:

> How did you first begin your learning? Did you pick up a book?
> Go to online forums? Ask a friend? Take a short course?

I wanted to do a personal website, so I bought Laura Lemay's "Teach 
yourself HTML 4 in a week"  (or was that "45 minutes"? :)

It was a good solid book, well written and pretty clear on what it 
wanted to teach.  I remember in the back there was an appendix that 
talked about this new bleeding edge method called "style sheets" -- 
basically the author showed the basics and then said, "but none of the 
current browsers can do this very well right now."  (This was when 
Netscape 4 was still King.)

It was good that I was pre-alerted to the coming of CSS, because it 
prepared me to very quickly embrace that method when browsers caught up 
to the standard.  I understood from the beginning, even before I knew 
how to use it, that CSS was out there.

So ultimately I read two books: one on HTML 4 back when it was new, and 
one on CSS.  From there I've used websites and this list, among other 
resources.  I do still buy books for new "core concept" topics, such as 
PHP and SQL, and flesh out the details with the web.

I think that those first two books about the best way I could have 
learned, because it gave me a good solid foundation on which to build; 
and I think that it's the best way to teach.  You have to start with 
HTML and teach that, but give the basic concept of CSS from the start 
so they know that they're going to learn that next.  As they get the 
hang of the markup, start introducing the CSS.

I'm glad Laura Lemay had the foresight to talk about CSS even when it 
was not yet useable.  :)

Steve