Hello from a lurker turned first poster,
tl;dr - materials engineer revisiting coding as a tool to develop web apps. What languages/frameworks are best for self-teaching?
---
More detail:
1. My father was a Cobol developer
2. I was writing TRS BASIC code in elementary school
3. Used to build X86 Wintel machines when that was a popular thing
4. Breezed through AP Computer programming and my one undergraduate computer class (intro to Java) a decade ago
5. Never had a class that talked object and/or database structures and the like
6. No real coding since undergrad except for little bits of Matlab here and there for "science" things
7. Never had a Linux machine (purely Windows), but thinking of switching my Thinkpad to Ubuntu or Mint
8. In the past year I taught myself enough CSS, PHP, bash, and Apache configuration to run a Wordpress installation on shared hosting for our wedding website.
9. Now that the wedding is over, I'm taking baby steps on a friend's Linode VPS and trying to digest nginx in the context of making Wordpress run quickly and securely.
I have a healthy respect for the huge gap between writing executable code, and writing good code. I don't know that I've ever done the latter. So much has changed in decade, I need some help on where to start.
Thanks all,
-p
In terms of frameworks, I think if I was just starting, I'd try out something small like Flask[1] or Bottle[2], and get the basic concepts of how web apps should be designed and deployed. Afterwards, I'd "graduate" and take a look at Django via the Django Book[6].
[1] http://diveintopython.org/
[2] http://greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkpython.html
[3] http://learnpythonthehardway.org/index
[4] http://flask.pocoo.org/
[5] http://bottlepy.org/docs/dev/
[6] http://www.djangobook.com/