“I would have liked to have seen more animal crackers and prunes in my dessert.” I overheard that phrase being uttered on Food Network last night, and thought it was a good one to share with all of you.

As promised, I failed miserably at blogging three times a week like I have my Outlook calendar reminders set up for, that “Snooze” button is far to easy to hit. I’ve noticed some of my colleagues have had time to blog, so I suppose I should too, so, here’s another blog that I can chalk up and say I’ve written.

First, Web Design World Seattle 2009 is a quick few days away! Don’t look for me there, as the price tag doesn’t agree with the tight budget we’re all on these days, BUT, if you’re lucky enough to attend, it should be a great one this year. Some fantastic speakers lined up including Cameron Moll, Stephanie Sullivan, and Dan Rubin.

Here’s a statement that I’ve lived by for a number of years, much to the chagrin of some of my friends that I’ve worked on web projects with. I loath code libraries, templating engines, frameworks, and the like. My argument has been the sheer overhead these bring to projects, all the unnecessary code added, and in my opinion the maintainability of the project as a whole. Also the fact that I don’t like not knowing what the code is doing and how it’s working, one thing you have absolute knowledge of when you hand code everything yourself. However, over the years, my arguments are becoming weaker and weaker by more advanced techniques coming out to accomplish tasks. This couldn’t be any more obvious than in Javascript libraries, which is why, around a year ago, I decided I’d finally give a Javascript library a chance.

There are tons of libraries to choose from, some of the majors being jQuery, Moo Tools, Prototype, DOJO, and Yahoo’s YUI. After weighing the pros, cons, looking at implementation, code examples, I settled on jQuery as the library I would at least try. At this point, I couldn’t be happier using jQuery, and don’t think I’d start another project without it. The simplicity of the code required to do even some of the most complex DOM manipulation is amazing, and chances are, if you don’t know how to accomplish a task, it’s likely that someone has already tried it and put out a tutorial on how to do it. The transition from beginning jQuery to being adapt in it is very quick, as there are a number of great tutorial sites out there. There is also an extensive plugin database as well a great number of extended libraries that utilize jQuery. All in all, my pilgrimage into the depths of (at least this) Javascript library was a pleasant one, though the same thing cannot be said about frameworks, but that’s another blog post all together.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll post and review some of the jQuery code we’ll be using on the new Pierce College website.

Resources

• Tutorials: Learning jQuery
• Extended UI Library: jQuery TOOLS
• Extended UI Library: jQuery UI
• Plugins: Plugin Repository

I often get asked what books I recommend for learning or mastering (X)HTML, CSS, PHP, AJAX, etc, and I’m always at a loss of what to tell people.  See, I’ve never specifically went out and bought a book for any of that.  Everything I’ve learned over the years has been through experimentation, viewing examples, tearing down other people’s pages to see how they got things to work, and lots of reading, on the web.

I’m not sure it’s necessary to ever buy a book to learn web design and development, but I suppose it depends on how you learn.  I think there are more than enough online resources to get anyone interested started in any web language. And there are even more tutorials and walkthroughs for the more advanced.

But, because I’ve been asked the question so much, I’ve decided to compile a list of sources I would recommend, both in print and online.

Markup

• HTML, XHTML, and CSS, Sixth Edition (Visual Quickstart Guide)
• Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML
• Learning Web Design: A Beginner’s Guide to (X)HTML, StyleSheets, and Web Graphics

CSS

• Bulletproof Web Design
• Designing with Web Standards
• CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions

General and Usability

• Don’t Make Me Think
• Designing with Web Standards

Tutorial Links

• Tizag.com – Great reference for beginning HTML, CSS, PHP, Ajax, PHP, MySQL and more
• HTML Dog – HTML and CSS tutorials from beginner to advanced
• W3schools.com – Full tutorials on just about every language
• W3c.org – World Wide Web Consortium

Inspiration

• Smashing Magazine (http://www.smashingmagazine.com/)
• Web Resources Depot (http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/)
• Net Tuts+ (http://net.tutsplus.com/)

Industry Leaders

• A List Apart (http://www.alistapart.com/)
• Jeffery Zeldman (http://www.zeldman.com/)
• Cameron Moll (http://www.cameronmoll.com/)
• Veerle Pieters (http://veerle.duoh.com/)
• Andy Rutledge (http://www.andyrutledge.com/)

Here is a web development timeline starting from 1990 through 2009 and how all the client and server side versions have evolved.

URL: http://tinyurl.com/cetjjp

Source: Wikimedia.org

First posts are terrible, if you’ve never written one, I suggest you try.  The problem with first blog posts, is that they are never actually about what your blog is about.  This blog for instance, it’s about what I’m doing with the Pierce College website, advancements in web technologies, things I find interesting, etc. But this post will be about none of that, except telling you what my next blog posts are going to be about.  It’s truly amazing the worthlessness of these first posts, but we all inevitably feel we cannot just jump right in and start off without some sort of introduction, it just not natural.  That being the case, you’ll read this, which has nothing to do with anything I will blog about later, and hopefully decide not to write my blog off the list of things to check, and will come back once I’ve posted something of (what at least I think) will be valid and interesting material.

Oh, and as typical with all first blog posts, here’s a few tidbits about me, which again, aren’t relevant to anything:

• Spelling is not my strong suit, I’ll do my best to write things in Word first, but no guarantees
• I’m not very good at keeping up a blogs, but I do plan to do better with this one – Outlook reminders will be my key to at least mediocre success
• I find a lot of value in what others say, but not so much in what I say, but I will not let that disway me from posting (provided I remember to set the Outlook reminders)
• I like parenthesis, semicolons, and hyphens, but likely don’t use them correctly, so you’ll have to deal with that
• Oh, and code snippets, I might post them, and you can immediately ignore them if you’ve no idea what I’m talking about

And with that, I’m off.