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database/web development?

punchdrunk

Graduate Poster
P
Joined
May 6, 2004
Messages
1,003
Hi folks,

I think I need a new career path. Right now I'm a network administrator, but I'd like to get into database/web development (and it seems thats a more lucrative field at this point). Some questions:

What technology should I get into? .NET/SQL backend? Is that the next big thing?

Can you recommend any good courses that can be taken to learn this development? I've had some db and programming courses in college but I would still be basically a newbie to the whole thing.

Any good books I should look into?

Thank you very much in advance.
 
When it comes to looking for course info and the like, google is your friend :). For books, Sybex are generally regarded as very good techincal books for learning, check www.sybex.com I think to see what they might have.

Jumping into .NET is fairly heavy. Definetly have to be strong on the programming/development side of things. Web development is almost a misnomer these days as its integrated so much into enterprise applications. With everyone dreaming of going thinclient, and integrating enterprise management of workstations, applications, equipment lifecycle and all the rest, obviously database backends and web development, in the vein of providing thinclient access is at the heart of that.

But there's tons of opportunity for a good old network administrator, you just have to completely reinvent yourself is all :D. Citrix is pretty huge, packaging of applications, Server consolidation/virtualization using VMWare or MS Virtual Server, there's tons of stuff to do out there. IP Telephony, mostly using Cisco equipment. I recently switched out of a long time position as a network administrator in my own little corner of the world and tossed myself back into the consulting racket. Its been interesting, and very busy with all the learning I've done. I should have done it a long time ago.
 
ASP.NET may be up and coming, but there are more java sites at the moment. Either of those could be lucrative. My company is maintaining classic ASP/COM+ and Java apps, and doing most new development in .NET.

The advice I would give a high school or college student trying to enter the field would be: "Read K&R, learn C, understand it inside and out. I don't care about certifications or any specific technology right now, I need to know that you're smart enough to pick up anything."

Not sure how I would adapt that to someone with an existing career. Best of luck, though.
 
rhoadp said:
.NET/SQL backend?
Click to expand...

It is way too early to focus on a particular technology, don't bind yourself to a particular solution. .Net won't be around forever, just as the COM technologies it's replacing weren't around forever.

Learn principles and theories first, then think about specializing.

If you'll be self-teaching at first then open-source provides some good oppourtunities at a low price with PHP or perl, MySQL or PostgreSQL. Ruby on Rails is considered an up and comer here too.

Microsoft has cheap/free stuff available for self-learners too. MSDE is SQL Server for free, just missing some high-end features.
 
Re: Re: database/web development?

kevin said:
It is way too early to focus on a particular technology, don't bind yourself to a particular solution. .Net won't be around forever, just as the COM technologies it's replacing weren't around forever.

Learn principles and theories first, then think about specializing.

If you'll be self-teaching at first then open-source provides some good oppourtunities at a low price with PHP or perl, MySQL or PostgreSQL. Ruby on Rails is considered an up and comer here too.

Microsoft has cheap/free stuff available for self-learners too. MSDE is SQL Server for free, just missing some high-end features.
Click to expand...

I am thinking of taking a class, off or online, if I find something I think is worthy. I think I could use the structure it would provide. But that's assuming I can find a decent college class - don't know if they exist for the new technologies.
 
Re: Re: Re: database/web development?

rhoadp said:
I am thinking of taking a class, off or online, if I find something I think is worthy. I think I could use the structure it would provide. But that's assuming I can find a decent college class - don't know if they exist for the new technologies.
Click to expand...

Don't think of this as new technologies. Databases have been around for ever (in computer time at least). Web technology no longer is really new, but is newer than databases. Programming is programming if you're interacting with a browser or through regular GUI or a command-line. Different concepts that build on each other.

If you learn about databases, and you learn about programming and you learn about web browser technology then you're a web developer without needing to find a "web developer" class that specializes in ASP/.Net/SQL Server 2005.

If you really want to get in on bleeding edge web applicaiton development look at AJAX. It isn't one technology but a host of them working together to produce some amazing results (google maps is a big user of ajax)

http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000385.php
 
kevin said:
Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie and is referring to the book "The C Programming Language".

http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/cbook/

Excellent book
Click to expand...

Ah, those names are ringing some bells - I had a semester of C in college and that may have been the book from which we learned. It goes from main{} to object-oriented in like 12 chapters...? I'll see if that's what it is when I get home Monday.

thanks
 
Re: Re: Re: Re: database/web development?

kevin said:
Don't think of this as new technologies. Databases have been around for ever (in computer time at least). Web technology no longer is really new, but is newer than databases. Programming is programming if you're interacting with a browser or through regular GUI or a command-line. Different concepts that build on each other.

If you learn about databases, and you learn about programming and you learn about web browser technology then you're a web developer without needing to find a "web developer" class that specializes in ASP/.Net/SQL Server 2005.
Click to expand...

I don't think of databases or web interfaces as new, but tying the two together is something that I've never learned, so it's new to me, as well as interesting. And at work it seems we're always needing this type of application developed, so that's another encouragement.
 
I'm casting about in the same marketplace question and come to the opposite conclusion. There seems to be many more opportunities for network administrators than developers around my locale. Is the career move out of interest to try something new or motivated by a sense that you may soon be "redundant" as our British friends would say?
 
SezMe said:
Is the career move out of interest to try something new or motivated by a sense that you may soon be "redundant" as our British friends would say?
Click to expand...

Both. What type of skillsets are needed in the opportunities you're seeing in your area?
 
rhoadp said:
Hi folks,

I think I need a new career path. Right now I'm a network administrator, but I'd like to get into database/web development (and it seems thats a more lucrative field at this point). Some questions:

What technology should I get into? .NET/SQL backend? Is that the next big thing?

Can you recommend any good courses that can be taken to learn this development? I've had some db and programming courses in college but I would still be basically a newbie to the whole thing.

Any good books I should look into?

Thank you very much in advance.
Click to expand...

Whenever taking career advice, you should know who's giving it... I've been doing we development since 97, professionally since 99. Background is in perl, java and (lately) .net

That said... the others here are right. Don't get super attached to a framework (ASP/CGI/JSP), learn the concepts. Understand what HTTP is and how it works (as a net admin, you may already).

Take a look at the different technologies, and get a feel for what each does... You can do the same thing in Perl, ASP.net (avoid old ASP if you can), Java, etc., but some tools are more appropriate than others. For that matter, you may just LIKE some better than others (this perl geek says pbbbbt! at PHP, but some folks like it).

Also, even if you're going to do middle layer stuff (which might be a good idea for a DBA), understand what the front-end can do and more importantly, what it can't.

Yeah, HTML can be a pain, but it's still the dominant web GUI tool.

Other than that... Remember, O'Reilly books are your friends :)
 
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: database/web development?

rhoadp said:
I don't think of databases or web interfaces as new, but tying the two together is something that I've never learned, so it's new to me, as well as interesting. And at work it seems we're always needing this type of application developed, so that's another encouragement.
Click to expand...

Incidently... for all the tecnologies, servers and TLA / ETLAs, 99% of the time you're just creating a text document to return to the browser... understand that document and you're half-way to being a true web guy :)
 
Check the job ads in your area and see whats in demand. Not every area is the same Java is hot here right now.

If you want to learn Java you can get one of the best book available for free here yes it is legally free.

http://www.planetpdf.com/developer/article.asp?ContentID=6632

I passed the Java Certified Programmer exam on my own with mostly free books and internet resources you can really crack down and do it in 6 months or maybe less.
 
Anti_Hypeman said:
If you want to learn Java you can get one of the best book available for free here yes it is legally free.
Click to expand...

Doesn't cover the latest version of Java, though...
 
JamesM said:
Doesn't cover the latest version of Java, though...
Click to expand...
I wouldn't be bothered about that. Most of the new features are just eye candy, internal workings or utilities. Or plain bad. It is also going to take a while for Java 5 to penetrate the market. And even so, you can happily program on a Java 5 platform without having to bother with generics, enums, autoboxing, etc.

Having said that, Unicode 4.0, SASL and some other additions like the concurrency package are nice or semi-nice additions. But my point is: Yes, Java is great for web application development, but even so, you need to learn Java as a language and the additions brought in by Java 5 arn't very significant in terms of good programming practise.
 
I'm a web app developer myself.

First...Check the market. Things are calmer now than they were a couple years ago, but it's still pretty volatile and jobs can be hard to come by for newbies. It all depends on your locale.

Second...Figure out if you want to go the Microsoft route or not. Learning SQL Server's all well and good, but primarily you're only going to be concerned with it if you're going to be getting into .NET development. (I'm not a fan, and it costs a buttload of money to learn, so I personally wouldn't recomment it. YMMV.)

Third...Learn how the web works. Learn how webservers, distributed applications, etc. work. Figure out what an "application server" means and how it's different from a webserver.

Fourth...Learn several database systems and languages. The more you know, and the more you know about what you know, the better your chances are. Oracle's a good DB to know, and has a free version to use so you can learn it. Also check out MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Finally...Figure out what language you want to learn. Others have recommended Java--Java's great, don't get me wrong, but it might not be a good starting point. If you take on Java for web development, that means trying to grok pretty much all of J2EE. Again, that's great, and a good career path, but maybe not such a good starting point if you're green.

I'd suggest learning PHP as a good place to start.

Some reasons:

- Apache and PHP are both free to download and use, and fairly simple to set up
- PHP is easy, especially if you don't have a whole lot of coding experience
- PHP works beautifully "out of the box" with most databases, including Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

Just my $.05 (adjusted for gas prices)
 
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