Web Development Tools

Hi guys hope everyone is doing well and ready to start learning. First of all let me just aplogize for the delay in putting up this tutorial for everyone, as it turns out that making tutorials is way harder than I originally thought. This tutorial may not be very useful to people who already have a foundation in web development, and I will basically be sharing the resources and tools I usually use for making my web pages and stuff.

Starting with the tools, you will most definately need a text editor and for those on Windows you should already have Notepad, for Linux regardless of the distro that you are running you should already have my favourite text editor called Gedit and lastly for Macs you should already have TextMate. For Windows however I would strongly recommend getting Notepad++ which gives you alot more functionality than Notepad. Notepad++ can be found at the File Hippo website and download the latest version. One more thing you definately need is a web server, I am using WAMP server for Windows, you can even get a MAMP server for Mac, a LAMP server for Linux (the link provided is to the instructions of how to install it) or if want to install on any machine at all simply install the XAMPP server.Since AJAX is a server side language you WILL HAVE TO INSTALL THE APPROPRIATE SERVER. Oh by the way still on the note of text editors there is no harm in using a WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver or the Visual Web Developer(which is free for the express edition) as long as you understand what you are doing. One more thing I would recommend getting if you already haven't got is Firefox because it has alot of nice addons and built in tools to debug your code.

I do understand that alot of times when we work on our own we don't really have anyone around to help us out and what I am going to do for that is build an archive as a side bar of useful websites for programming in general. On that topic though if you don't already know about it you should bookmark W3Schools on your favourite browser.

Now that you should be up and running the next post will be introduction to the AJAX way of thinking. Please do bare with me as I am not too good at giving tutorials so comments on these would be highly appreciated :).