(Part 2) Top products from r/webdev

You've chosen an interesting time to pick up web development! /u/GruntildaJr left an excellent guide on learning front end development, but as a back-end developer I wanted to chime in for the other half.

Learning back-end development without an internet connection will be a little more difficult, but certainly not impossible nor any more effort than a few hours of getting things configured. Nearly any web server can be hosted on your personal machine without an internet connection. Apache is my personal choice and likely one of the easiest to setup on Windows, but Nginx is a lot of fun and there's plenty of options.

Here is a fairly straight forward tutorial for setting up a local development environment on Windows. Although the writer suggests using Zend Eclipse as an editor and I would have to point you towards PHPStorm or Atom with a linter and autocomplete plugin. That said, Eclipse will serve you fine. After completing the tutorial you will have PHP, MySQL, PHPMyAdmin, and Apache set up and running. While not especially fancy, these are the basic tools to start learning the ins and outs of back-end development.

As for learning materials, I love Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript and PHP The Right Way. If you want something very beginner friendly and a bit easier to read, PHP Pandas is a good option.

Of the three, PHP The Right Way will be the biggest challenge. It moves quickly and takes you the furtherest, if you haven't programmed before I wouldn't recommend starting with it but I would recommend going through it after you've gotten some experience under your belt. The O'Reilly book is good for walking through a stack of technologies and outlining how they interact to make a full website, while PHP Pandas is a more thorough dive into the language itself (and it's a lot less painful to slog through if you don't like textbooks). All three are excellent and stand well on their own. If you can only select a single one though, I'd highly recommend the O'Reilly book.

A good companion for any more formal book is the Learn X In Y Minutes PHP Page. It's a little one page cheat sheet to reference when you forget something like the syntax for a switch statement or why you should use double instead of single quotes. There's also a bunch of other languages including JavaScript and I've found them all incredibly helpful. Zeal, as mentioned by GruntildaJr is also a great asset, and it contains the pages for PHP.

There are back-end languages other than PHP along with plenty of frameworks and libraries to explore and learn. I don't want to make it sound as if PHP is your only choice, or the best choice for a back-end language. I do think that it is one of the best choices for a back-end language when you take the learning offline, though. There is a wealth of offline literature, I only linked a few books but the market is simply saturated with PHP texts. The language also stands easily on its own, and for the most part the texts treat it as such. You won't constantly be needing to "pip install" or "npm install" like you do with Python and Node.js.

I hope all of that was of some help, it can be a hump to get over that initial setup but afterwards the learning is much more rewarding. Happy developing and godspeed!

I'm going to assume you're a complete newbie. I'm only a few steps ahead of you, really, but I can share some advice. I've always felt like 75% of the battle is figuring out what to learn when it comes to scripting or computer languages in general. And a lot of time, even cutting edge, comprehensive sources are outdated within a few years and, if you follow their advice, you may expose yourself to security concerns. Like leapyquacky said, the question is a bit vague, but I'm going to assume you want employees to access a page with user-specific credentials so no employee can impersonate another, etc:

1. PDOs/prepared statements are the best way to connect to the DB. The PDO documentation will help immensely. It should be easy enough if you've ever done any OOP. The reason for this -- and this is really paramount, especially if it's on the internet -- is the risk of SQL injections.
   
   
2. To maintain any semblance of security, you'd need to hash your users' passwords, and likely with something a little more secure than MD5. There's an excellent article on Openwall about this. You'd need a hash, a salt, and minimum length/complexity requirements for your passwords. This is just not good practice, it's essential if you store anything sensitive.
   
   
3. You'd be using sessions to maintain state across your pages. The best videos I can think of on sessions are behind a paywall, but the documentation should get you pretty far. phpacedemy on YouTube has a few videos on sessions, if I recall. Just remember, if you're using YouTube to learn about sessions, a lot of those videos are dated and the security practices won't be ideal. If you see them connecting to their DB using mysql_connect, this is the case. Listen to the session advice, but don't use that function unless you care to get pretty technical about escaping user input.
   
   
4. You're going to need levels of access on the page -- admin, general, etc., so you can protect information and actions that need to be secure. You'd probably also want a running log of all the changes your users made to the database.
   
   
5. None of this stuff will make much sense unless you're familiar with PHP. The documentation is great, but I recommend reading a good book on it, bearing in mind that whatever you read could be out of date. (Hint: Argh, matey, thar be a website that may get yeh the book yeh want withou' yer payin'.)
   
   It's not hard but it requires a scattershot of understanding that may take a little while to really get. I know it did for me, anyway. Once you have that going on, you'll probably have more specific questions. Lookin' forward to it.
   

In that case here you go.

____


They're ok. Try this. Codecademy isn't bad. It won't teach you much in the way of doing things but it does teach you the way to type out code, the general process and stuff. I can't speak for myself because I work as a professional developer and have been tinkering with code for 10 years now, but I did give the first lesson to one of my brothers. He's not great with computers or the Internet, but he was able to follow the first two sections of the basic HTML/CSS course and able to make his own site albeit very basic in nature nearly a month later (3 week gap following him doing the lessons). He was able to do a rough basic site of his Facebook profile, and he nailed it. It should open doors for you in terms of having the basic knowledge of how to do things. It'll allow you to read more advanced stuff and pick it up much faster than if you hadn't.

Below is a list I sent to someone on here a while back.

>
>http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1eqaqo/best_books_or_online_resources_for_comprehensive/ca2w2dn?context=3



>PHP and MySQL Web Development (4th Edition)
>
>Beginning PHP and MySQL: From Novice to Professional
>
>Read the second book, do all the examples, then go back to the first book. Pay a lot of attention toward array manipulation. When you're comfortable with that, get into OOP. Once you do and OOP clicks for you, you'll be able to go to town on anything. I've heard a lot of good about Jefferey Way's video lesson courses over at TutsPlus. I've never used them nor do I need to, but I've never heard a single bad thing about their video courses. Their Javascript and Jquery is a great starting point. This is great stuff too if you're willing to put in the time.
>
>Professional JavaScript for Web Developers
>
>JavaScript: The Definitive Guide: Activate Your Web Pages
>
>Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS3
>
>The Node Beginner Book
> Professional Node.js: Building Javascript Based Scalable Software
>
>Paid online "schooling":
>
>http://teamtreehouse.com/
>
>http://www.codeschool.com/
>
>Bonus:
>
>http://hackdesign.org/
>
>
>I've got a shit ton (Excuse my French) of books in print and E-Format that I could recommend, but it would span a couple pages. Anything is easy to learn so as long is it's served in a hierarchical format that makes it easy to absorb the information. A year ago I started to learn Ruby and using ROR as a framework. I can say it's been quite fun and I feel confident that I could write a fully complete web app using it. I started node.JS a few months ago, but it's been on break due to being sick and some unexpected events.
>
>My knowledge is extensive only because I wanted it to be. I'm not gifted by any means nor am I special. Not by a longshot. Some people are gifted when it comes to dev and design, most are not. Most only know one or the other. I forced myself to learn and be good at both. I'm 23, I started when I was about 12. I'm only breathing more comfortably now. I know a load of people on here and other sites who make me look like complete shit.
>
>
>Also for what it's worth, sign up to StackOverflow. It's the bible and holy grail rolled up into one site. It's amazing.
>
>Also;
>
>Hattip to /u/ndobie
>
>> CodeAcademy
> Team Treehouse
> CodeSchool. This is more programming but still very useful & has free stuff.
> Tuts+
> Google. Probably the best way to find out how to do something specific.
> This subreddit. If you have any questions about how to do something, like parallax scrolling, try searching for it, then ask, make sure to include an example of what you want if you don't know what it is called.

Quite frankly, what did you expect? Every one starts somewhere.

http://stackoverflow.com is your friend. It is a great resource and you will be able to find a lot of information there.

Now, in regards to the technologies you want to learn, you need to start with the basics. Javascript is arguably harder than the rest, so I think your focus should lie there. You should be asking questions like:

• What is the document object model? How does it get rendered?
  
• What is the concept of object oriented programming and how does it work?
  
• What makes Javascript such a powerful language?
  
• What is jQuery and how does it make traversing the document object model easier?
  
  After you've learned those basics, you then need to evaluate the trends and topics in your workplace.
  
  
• What are recurring topics?
  
• What are their goals?
  
• Where do you fit in with the team?
  
• What part of their code do they consider the weakest (poorly written/designed)?
  
  Then you can focus on certain things. For instance, if they feel that most of their goals are related to user interface design, you may want to consider learning about more HTML and CSS (arguably the easiest of the three).
  
  However, if they feel like they need to add more functionality to pages and build backend code, you will probably need to learn more Javascript and jQuery. Remember, jQuery is a Javascript library and learning both together is the best route you can take (in my opinion).
  
  Here are a few resources which I used to get a better grasp on certain topics (quite frankly, I never finish books because all of this information is online).
  
  http://www.amazon.com/JavaScript-jQuery-The-Missing-Manual/dp/1449399029
  http://www.amazon.com/HTML5-Missing-Manual-Matthew-MacDonald/dp/1449363261
  http://www.amazon.com/CSS3-Missing-David-Sawyer-McFarland/dp/1449325947/
  
  All of the Missing Manual books are fairly well written and will give you a lot of insight on those languages.
  
  However, if you prefer to be taught rather than teaching yourself, some good resources like these may help you:
  
  https://www.codeschool.com/
  https://www.codecademy.com/
  
  Both of these websites are tailored to teaching you to code within your browser. I've found both of them to be excellent.
  
  Some resources which you will want to keep in handy:
  
  http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/the-30-css-selectors-you-must-memorize--net-16048 - Great tutorial on CSS selectors that may prove invaluable when working with CSS.
  
  http://diveintohtml5.info/ - A very well made web page regarding HTML5, its new features, and some other interesting topics.
  
  http://api.jquery.com/ - The documentation for jQuery. I know this can be found easily, but I can't stress enough how useful it will be to have this page open while you are reading through jQuery code.
  
  ...and much more. You will find more information online everywhere. If you feel like you need more information, feel free to PM me.
  
  Remember:
  
  "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough" - Albert Einstein
  
  This is only the beginning of your long journey if you choose to stay in the development field. Good luck!
  
  Edit: Thank you so much for gold! If anyone else wants more information, feel free to PM me. I don't have anyone to talk to about web development XD

Not really related to mobile development, but he should still really enjoy these if he hasn't read them already:

• Clean Code (http://www.amazon.com/Clean-Code-Handbook-Software-Craftsmanship/dp/0132350882) anything by Uncle Bob tends to be easy to learn and extremely useful
  
  
• Seven Languages in Seven Weeks (http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Languages-Weeks-Programming-Programmers/dp/193435659X) really fun read and a good way to quickly learn a little about a lot. Great for a jack of all trades
  
  
• The C Programming Language (http://www.amazon.com/The-Programming-Language-2nd-Edition/dp/0131103628) a book every dev, no matter the domain, should read
  
  
• Land of Lisp (http://www.amazon.com/Land-Lisp-Learn-Program-Game/dp/1593272812) because learning functional programming makes you a better programmer
  
  
• The Pragmatic Programmer (http://www.amazon.com/The-Pragmatic-Programmer-Journeyman-Master/dp/020161622X) I actually just started this one last night so I can't say much about it. Including it anyway because really smart people recommended it
  
  
• Eloquent JavaScript (http://www.amazon.com/Eloquent-JavaScript-Modern-Introduction-Programming/dp/1593272820) really good "intro" to JavaScript. Even if he's already familiar with the language, there maybe be a lot more to it than he know about (closures, prototype, "this", functional programming, etc.)

I buy books because they go into a lot more details, or often are written really well, and easy to follow. Also, it's really nice to read paper. Often I keep books in the office as it's a quick and reliable way to research a topic in-depth without scrolling through hundreds of shit articles on a particular (and even controversial subject).

I really recommend these:

High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, and Replication - I've read snippets, but it's recommended a lot and very good for more advanced readers.

SQL Antipatterns: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Database Programming - VERY beginner friendly, easy to read, follow, provides real and common scenarios and explains the anti-pattern, it's problems, the reasons to sometime excuse their use, and solutions. I love this book.

The Go Programming Language - Very good read, not TOO technical jargon, very nice to read, explains in depth and in an understandable way.

I've had plenty more over the years, but these are my current I have at home. Still more on order. :)

>Is there something wrong with me? Or is this a normal thing?

No, programming challenges are more about general problem solving via coding than the ability to write functioning apps. You have experience in the latter and not the former so will not be as good at coding challenges.

But like everything else practice is what makes you good at something so if you keep trying them you will be able to learn to solve them. And I think it is worth doing so, they teach you to techniques to solve some harder problems you can face in real world applications, though you might not see them as often. Overall they can make you a better programmer.

But there is a limit to their usefulness, like if you master app dev you don't master coding challenges, if you master coding challenges you won't master app development.

Solving the problems of coding challenges is a skill. It can be learnt like any other skill. I think it is worth learning how to solve them, but there is no need to become the best at solving them. If you are having trouble with all of them I highly recommend reading Think like a programmer which teaches how to better tackle problems you face and break them down into easier to solve chunks.

---

Some interviewers will ask you to solve a coding challenge. Through not always and the ones that do often use the same challenges (fizzbuzz is a classic one). Not being able to solve them will hamper some of your attempts to get a job, but won't stop you from getting any job. It won't even stop you from getting a good job as better places often ask better problems that are more relevant to the job rather than some random challenge they found on the web.

Hi James!

One of the best books for a novice web developer/designer (and not just novice, for anyone who wants to get up to speed with the newest editions of HTML and CSS) in my opinion is the "Learning Web Design" by Jennifer Robbins. The 5th edition was published in May last year, so it's pretty recent. You won't be learning any outdated stuff from this book.

The book is quite big, with around 800 pages, but the author is really great. She explains everything you need to know and she explains it really good. Throughout the book you'll be building an example web site by doing a lot of exercises.

The book starts with an explanation of how Internet works in general. It doesn't go too deep into this topic, just enough for a beginner. You'll then learn HTML, and after that CSS. There are two chapters on JavaScript, but it covers only bare essentials. You'll need another book(s) for JavaScript, though. The one I would recommend is Head First JavaScript Programming, which somebody already recommended it, too.

The Head First HTML and CSS and HTML and CSS: Design and Build Websites (also already recommended by other users here) are also great, but they are a little bit old now, as they are from 2011. Not that you won't learn anything from them. You could read these two, and then the book by Jennifer Robbins, so you get better familiarity with HTML 5 and CSS 3.

>would you say this is critical knowledge to be a good web developer?

Not really. Most people are out there solving business needs. Even if you're working for a web app, the majority of it is taking a business problem and building and designing a solution around it in whatever way makes the most sense. How good the architecture is, is really not super important because you're likely not going to be supporting enough customers that throwing more hardware at it can't solve. Knowing how things work and how to build maintainable software, is more important than knowing obscure CS fundamentals inside and out.

But what you described sounds more like something from Amazon, Apple, FB, MS, Google, or other large tech company. They want true blue software engineers, not someone who can make them a pretty landing page. I know from first hand experience that FB interviews for JS developers hit heavily on memory managment and Amazon doesn't give a shit what language you program in. Cracking the Coding Interview is a good way to study for all of those (but you're not going to memorize that book in the time you have).

I’ve heard this book is great but I haven’t read it


HTML and CSS: Design and Build Websites https://www.amazon.com/dp/1118871642/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_yY8NDbZG7CJHK

I started learning on https://Codecademy.com

Then soon after that I started building websites for people. Pretty soon that turned into a freelance side hustle.

I found that the accountability of actually having people expect me to finish things was better accountability than my own personal projects.

Did freelance for about 5 years and just recently switched to a full-time position as a UX/web designer.

So I do a mix of UX design and frontend dev. Small company so we split roles.

Now I teach people how to take the same path I did in web design at https://selfmadewebdesigner.com

The thing I tell everyone is as soon as you can, just start building things. Learning and going through courses is great. But you’ll learn way more through the actual building of things.

Triforce is right about the Jon Duckett book. It is an excellent resource that is pretty to look at, as well.

I learned all of my HTML5 & CSS3 basics from Learning Web Design by Jennifer Robbins. It is a great resource, and provides great design exercises for you to practice on.

Given your experience, you will need to bypass the first few chapters. Fortunately, the book is well-organized. This will allow you to only focus on the your particular area of need, and help when referencing the book after you finished learning the basics.

The book, Head First Design Patterns, is actually pretty good.

You could also read the book that started it all, Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Although good, it is a dull read - I had to force myself to get through it.

Martin Fowler is also really good, in particular, I thoroughly enjoyed his book Patterns of Enterprise Architecture.

If you want more of an MS/.NET slant of things, you should also check out Dino Esposito. I really enjoyed his book Microsoft .NET: Architecting Applications for the Enterprise.

My recommendation would be to start with the Head First book first, as this will give you a good overview of the major design patterns.

POSA books by Buschmann are considered to be the textbooky, Knuth/SICP level stuff from when I studied and are architecture equivalent to the GoF's design thing, but as a consequence they're also huge on OOP. The Fowler Book is even more preachy and OOPy but many things are still relevant. The third would be Uncle Bob's Clean Architecture (sorry for cryptic refs, am on mobile, just Google the refs you'll find them.

On the systems design front one should learn ESB and SOA as they are patterns still relevant in this microservices world but most books on the subject are often tied to particular tech (and its often wrong tech like IBM or Oracle or MS proprietary, untraslateable/untransferable stuff). I've heard good things about Thomas Erl books [1].

I've recently read Sam Newman book on Microservices and while it does have a lot of zeitgeist in it at least it's current zeitgeist and the book is decent.

Edits:

• On keyboard now, added links.
  
• [1] Arcitura, Thomas Erl's company has informative (if a bit ugly) websites on both classical SOA patterns and Microservice patterns. Again, it's buzzwordy, preachy, enterprisey CIO-talk but if you cut through it there are some good overviews of various systems design patterns there and are a quick way to ingest the concepts before dedicating your time to these huge tomes.
  
• The mentioned books have aged well in general but some of the ideas they propose haven't aged that well so I'd like to dedicate a few bullet points to those:
  
  • MVC in particular, has lately fallen out of grace as UI pattern and has become delegated to the backend as data-presentation pattern (i.e. how you design, say, JSON API backends wrt DB access and transforming to JSON), whereas front-end UI has migrated to MOVE pattern which, in terms of GoF speek, mostly relates to MVC by replacing MVC's core Observer pattern with a Reactive programming Observable.
    
  • Active Record ORMs (think Hibernate) have fallen from grace and are becoming replaced with SQL building DSLs like Linq or ORMs with SQL builders below them. DTOs have also given way to either Monad-ic data access objects or swung back to the pre-AR/pre-DTO concept of Data Gateways (more common with Linq-style DSLs).
    
  • Reactive design in combination with Message Queuing has become more and more the method of choice for managing distributed state in SOAs.

I rather like this book, but I read it many years ago: http://www.amazon.com/CSS3-Missing-David-Sawyer-McFarland/dp/1449325947/

As for fonts, it's okay to use 2 fonts, but generally don't use more than that. Less is more. Here's a good website that lists good Google web fonts (and some font pairings): http://hellohappy.org/beautiful-web-type/

Also for medium/larger sized projects, I recommend using a framework like Bootstrap, follow their markup and you can restyle after. This way you can have more consistent look.

If you have any experience with manipulating tables in general then learning how to use a (MySQL) database is relatively intuitive, provided that you aren't concerned with optimization issues such as normalizing tables, scaling problems down the road, or managing any fancy relationships. I'm sorry for how demoralizing this sounds but... based on the needs you've described you could probably teach yourself all you'd need for that project and how to interact with a MySQL database via PHP in less time than its taken you jump through all these hoops trying to use Google spreadsheets.

Here's a good and relatively cheap book on the matter.

I read that book as a CS undergrad before taking any database classes and it helped quite a bit; in particular the chapters on MySQL are very concise and easy to read. Even if you've never seen PHP before just seeing MySQL syntax for the first time hopefully leads to a "oh well duh that's all very intuitive" moment. Hopefully it will help give you a better understanding of the larger picture and how these languages interact with each other.

Note: There are tons of other great, free resources online that you can peruse at your leisure without paying for a book.

The C Programming Language (aka K&R)

Everyone should have a copy of this book on the shelf. Sure there's arguably better books for learning C, and K&R hasn't even been updated in 28 years (the code in the book is not valid c99). But it's like the holy bible of programming books.

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution is worth a read.

All of Kevin Mitnick's books are good.

I'd honestly not really bother buying any books for learning actual programming from, since most stuff moves so fast, and there's so much material online to learn from.

Work on your code/portfolio in your spare time and apply to any job that interests you.

In terms of how to improve your code, I'd take a look at these resources:

HTML/CSS

• http://learn.shayhowe.com/html-css/
  
• http://learn.shayhowe.com/advanced-html-css/
  
  Javascript
  
  
• http://javascriptbook.com/
  
  PHP/MySQL
  
  
• http://www.amazon.co.uk/Learning-PHP-MySQL-JavaScript-Javascript/dp/1491918667
  
  Or look online for any good resources for whatever technology you want to get into.
  
  Good luck :)

First off I would look at what companies in particular you want. You could even start networking if they have an online presence, but at the very least you could find out what is booming in Iowa or KC based on the actual job market. Learning a language for the sole purpose of learning the language is kind of a waste of time, since it seems like you already have years of web dev experience in one form or another and aside from basic familiarity with an IDE and source control I doubt there's much difference to an employer who wants to know if you're a good fit with the people and team(s) you'll be working on.

Specializing is always good, but this is something that you can write your resume to reflect. Remember it's not a meritocracy. Companies don't hire best candidates, they hire best impressions. Becoming a "Master" in any language in the span of 7 months without actually working on a project team is basically impossible. But you could learn the fundamentals of a few, take a few Udacity courses for instance...

This and more is covered in a really good book by John Sonmez called Soft Skills http://www.amazon.com/Soft-Skills-software-developers-manual/dp/1617292397

There's a lot of good general coding advice on here so I'll keep my post relevant to life stuff. I came into web development after being an undiagnosed bipolar alcoholic for several years. Originally, I wanted to become a web designer but I quickly grew fascinated by the back-end development of a site and my skill set grew quickly.

One of the hardest challenges you will face is when this stuff is no longer new and exciting. You will have moments when it's hard to push yourself to code but like running, you have to push past the wall. A good book is Softskills for Software Developers https://www.amazon.com/Soft-Skills-software-developers-manual/dp/1617292397 you should check it out.

Here is an interactive page where people can visualize how Quicksort works, this is one of the most widely used sorting algorithms, once understood you can pick any of the other popular ones: Bubble, Insertion, Heap, Selection, etc. CtCI — Cracking the Coding Interview is a good book written by an engineer who used to be part of the recruitment team at Google and other "Big 4" companies, I really recommend it, every page is worth its penny*. Leet Code is also a good resource to learn and practice algorithms, most of the exercises have articles with good explanations of how to solve the problems.

• Although, as everything else, you can download it as a PDF file.

Head first books are really good except you should get the up to date version.

http://www.amazon.com/Head-First-JavaScript-Programming-Freeman/dp/144934013X

I read that javascript book back in the day and i definitely liked it. I'm not sure what's different in the new one but with programming it's always good to be up to date. If you can't get it then this one will do. Everything in there still works and javascript still has pretty much the same idea as in that book.

Hhm. Well, first of all, I think you might have a hard time finding a book that will teach about both design and web development. Each of those are complicated enough to write separate books on. I think you'll be better off by finding two separate books (one on web dev, one on design) than finding one that combines both.

A kind of the same goes for Web. Dev. This is such a broad term, that you will hardly find any book that tries to cram in every possible aspect of web development. If you are a bit more specific and focus on a specific technology (like NodeJS, ASP.net with Angular or just plain old PHP, MySQL and JavaScript ) you'll get more value for money. There are more generic books out there, but the technologies (especially for web dev) change almost daily and books simply can't keep up with that. If you'd ask me, I think you'll be much better off having a good understanding of JavaScript in general before you move on to a specific stack or framework.

Years ago, when I wanted to go from hacking around in PHP to learning to use the language properly, I found an excellent book that helped a lot: PHP Objects, Patterns and Practice. The author walks you through creating a basic framework of your own. (Personally, I prefer basic things to heavyweight frameworks anyway.) It's a great book, and it seems there was a new edition published in 2010. I would recommend it.

If you really want to learn, I think a good start for you would be to read this book it was a good start for me and a tremendous help. It should also cover the basics of everything you need to know. Also this video helped me a lot as well.

Mostly just practice, yeah, but there are some good resources out there. I really enjoyed this book:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1118871642/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_ykiRCbGKCKGAX

As a developer who doesn't consider himself in any way creative, I found The Principles of Beautiful Web Design very useful.

I would highly recommend this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Soft-Skills-software-developers-manual/dp/1617292397

I would also look into joining a local Toastmaster's club.

If you do those 2 things you'll definitely develop some great soft skills.

I'm going through the process of diving deep into wordpress and so far the best resource that I've found that delves into the specifics of using wordpress as a dev is this book. it should save you a lot of googling time.

I learned a lot about it from reading this guy:

http://www.amazon.com/High-Performance-MySQL-Optimization-Replication/dp/1449314287/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407623587&sr=8-1&keywords=high+performance+mysql

But things like normalization and denormalization are foundational to building the table schemas right from the get-go. I don't remember if the book covers it, and I don't have it on hand to check. You can google search that stuff easily, though.

buy this book: http://www.amazon.com/Learning-MySQL-JavaScript-Step-Step/dp/0596157134
and never look back.
If you want to go beyond any basic template for wordpress or anything else, you should check out PHP a little bit. Its super fucking easy.

To be perfectly honest, the one book that's "gotten through" to me is The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte. The book has a lot of examples of information design, both good and bad- and plenty of examples of taking a bad design and "refactoring" it so that it does a better job of conveying the information it contains.

For someone so spread out, one of the best things you can do is get a book about design patters / principles, as those theories spread across multiple languages.

General : http://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns-Elements-Reusable-Object-Oriented/dp/0201633612/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1345469375&sr=1-1&keywords=design+patterns

This was a decent one for PHP: http://www.amazon.com/Objects-Patterns-Practice-Experts-Source/dp/143022925X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1345469244&sr=8-1&keywords=php+design+patterns

I strongly recommend reading Gayle Laakmann Mcdowell's Cracking the Code Interview, or watching one of her lectures on the topic. Although her book goes into detail on the types of questions that can come up in these interviews, the general advice she gives in this lecture is solid gold.

I would suggest Django, IMO one of the best web frameworks out there

You will learn about DB design, ORM, models, separation of concerns, MVC etc..

Get the book tow scoops of django : https://www.amazon.com.mx/Two-Scoops-Django-Best-Practices/dp/0981467342/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1501773360&sr=8-1&keywords=two+scoops+of+django

Here are some good books dealing with web design on Amazon:

Universal Principles of Design

Don't Make Me Think

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

I've found data structures more useful than algorithms. This book is highly rated and imo a must read for all programmers.

https://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns-Object-Oriented-Addison-Wesley-Professional-ebook/dp/B000SEIBB8

You could make another post about which frameworks to start with, You'd probly get some good feedback, ignore the people who tell you to start with node.js though.

for backend Django is a popular python framework, I looked around and this seems to be a highly recommended book, but people say you'll want an introduction (free online book) to Django before you start that book

Then on frontend I would look into JQuery first, and then move on to a either React, Angular 2, or Backbone

There's always new technology to learn, especially if you're pursuing the "full stack engineer" title. Do you know all the details of browser performance? Familiar with http? TCP? TLS? Deep understanding of MySQL?

But really, technology receives too much attention, especially from junior developers. Most of the attributes of senior engineers are people-oriented, either in how you interact with others or the attitude you yourself take when approaching situations. Actually, I'll just stop here; go read that last link and listen to someone who tells it better than I can.

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture sounds like a must read for you.

Most people don't have the stomach to read books like this.

Cracking the Code Interview is an excellent book if you haven't already checked it out. It's more then just coding problems too. She tries to cover everything that you might need.

You might consider one of the "Head First" books. Some of them are a little out of date; they have a very distinctive style that you may really like or really hate. I think the style could be useful if you are dipping in and out of reading at work. Two examples:

https://www.amazon.com/Head-First-HTML-CSS-Standards-Based/dp/0596159900

https://www.amazon.com/Head-First-JavaScript-Programming-Brain-Friendly/dp/144934013X

I also have trouble when I have to choose the design so I'm reading this book

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0975841963?ref=olp_product_details

It's for people without any idea of design and I'm understanding a lot of things, also it's very cheap if you buy It used :)

http://www.amazon.com/Objects-Patterns-Practice-Experts-Source/dp/143022925X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1454065646&sr=8-2&keywords=php+pattern

Design Patterns - https://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns-Elements-Reusable-Object-Oriented-ebook/dp/B000SEIBB8?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0

I used this book. I just read every chapter, took notes, and quizzed myself at the end of each one.

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/1593274246/

PHP and MySQL Web Development (4th edition)

If he/she is serious about wordpress development, at some point or another this book will come in handy:

http://www.amazon.com/Professional-WordPress-Development-Brad-Williams/dp/111844227X/

You need to figure out what type or architecture you want to use. There's a few out there (n-tier, DDD, onion architecture ). These are code layer architectures for breaking up the code into manageable chunks.

The way I approach projects is by separating concerns into a UI layer (web, api), a service layer ( class library, has no state), a data access layer (db access).

In the db layer I follow the repository pattern . All my sql goes into a repository object. I also never reference the concrete object directly, instead I reference an interface in other layers.

I also use an IOC container to manage dependencies, but to do this the object must be built with dependency injection.

I know a through a lot of terms out , heres' some resources:

• http://jeffreypalermo.com/blog/the-onion-architecture-part-1/
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Domain-Driven-Design-Tackling-Complexity-Software/dp/0321125215
  
• https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff649690.aspx
  
• https://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/repository.html
  
• https://autofac.org/
  
• https://stackify.com/n-tier-architecture/
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Patterns-Enterprise-Application-Architecture-Martin/dp/0321127420
  
• https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/domain-driven-design-fundamentals