Web Development Beginner's Guides

For an average Windows user, delving into the complexities of a Unix or Linux system can be quite intimidating. This article should shed a little light on one of the most commonly encountered problems with users new to Unix—file permissions. A file permission is a setting placed on a file which allows only certain users to access, modify, or move it. System-critical files are almost always restricted to all but the root user, and system administrators will even use non-root accounts to prevent accidents from occurring and corrupting the file.

The Hyper-Text Markup Language (HTML) is a basic coding language which describes how a web page should look. Web browsers read HTML, and based on their interpretations of those instructions, it displays the content in a certain manner. It uses a series of tags to determine the location and format of text and media on the page, and those tags can be nested inside of each other to create subsections of the web page. To the beginner, HTML can be intimidating, but it's actually very easy to learn and use, and you can develop simple, static websites in very little time.

JavaScript is a scripting language which allows users to place dynamic content on their web pages and also allows for the creation of applications. It was designed to look like Java, the cross-platform programming language, but it was intended to be easier to use so that non-programmers could learn it readily. It's a common misconception that JavaScript is a direct descendant of Java, but it is only modeled to look like it.

PHP is an extremely popular scripting language used, primarily, by web designers to create websites. Scripting languages are languages which are processed by a computer on an as-needed basis, and the source code is fed through an interpreter which converts the necessary instructions into machine code and delivers the output.

Active Server Pages (ASP) is a server-side script engine developed by Microsoft to assist in the development of web pages. It utilizes built-in objects to facilitate the creation of commonly used portions of web pages, six of which exist in ASP 2.0, and those include: ASP Error, Server, Response, Session, Request, and Application. A website that uses ASP will most likely have the .asp extension, but that should not be confused with .aspx extensions which signify a second server-side script engine from Microsoft, ASP.NET.

FTP, also known as the File Transfer Protocol, is one of the several protocols used on the Internet to transfer files. As opposed to HTTP, it was specifically designed for two-way binary file transfer and file manipulation. In the FTP protocol, you do not see web pages. However, if you open an address under the FTP protocol in your web browser (done by typing ftp://www.website.com), your web browser will automatically generate a graphic display for the files.

Web analytics software provides tools to collect, monitor, and interpret data on a web server. There are a couple kinds of analytics software available: on-site and off-site. Off-site analytics measures the amount of people coming into your website and possibly from what other sites they come from. On-site analytics studies the movements of users inside your website from one page to another.