Rodent Regatta

SERENDIPITOUS CONVERGENCE
First the articles, then the bookstore, now this entry all in one day

Before I left home this morning, I stumbled into two articles. The first is an interview with Kevin Yank of Sitepoint.com. The second is an article by Kevin about PHP and MySQL. I had just recently had a conversation with someone who told me that web pages ending in PHP instead of HTML reflect a level of flexibility for future needs that HTML alone might not provide.
So, I wound up at the bookstore. As I pulled into the parking lot, I realized that what I really want to understand is something Kevin mentions in the interview. ”Asking a developer whether he tends towards one language is like asking a carpenter whether he tends toward one of his tools.”
Bing. That’s it! What I want to know is what the well-equipped web developer carries in the toolbox. There’s editing and scripting and server-side includes and a whole host of other terminology. But, if you were to be sent to the proverbial isle with a laptop that contained the tools you needed to develop web sites that are in demand today, what tools would be on it? For the sake of this drill, let’s forget about battery power – call it infinite. Let’s forget about bandwidth – call it plentiful. Forget about the host – you’ve got one and it’s properly equipped. The only other condition is you have to pack before you leave – no downloads, no credit card purchases once you are there - just what made it into the toolbox before you left!
Tell me this – which tools would be essential to you? Surely, some of those below would go in the toolkit, but what else? Which of these would you throw away? Remember, you’re trying to help a novice know where to start on the long, long learning curve! What’s essential to becoming a good, mainstream web developer and what’s not likely to get used?

• PHP
  
• Java
  
• Javascript
  
• .NET
  
• CGI
  
• HTML
  
• XML
  
• DHTML
  
• XHTML
  
• Perl
  
• Python
  
• J2EE
  
• MySQL
  
• a browser
  
• a text editor
  
• a wysiwyg editor
  
• a photo editor
  
• key websites you’d use? books? articles?

Maybe Jonathon can help!

A beginners guide to Movable Type, MySQL, and PHP. Over the next few weeks I’ll be moving my Movable Type weblog from an Australian Web hosting service in Australia to one in the USA. My esteemed compatriot, Allan Moult, and I intend to document the process as thoroughly as we can. I’ll be writing from the perspective of a… [Jonathon Delacour]