Hello, my name is Overly Ambitious...

I want to learn basic HTML & CSS coding. At the moment I'd like to tweak Blogger templates, format blog posts, and other basic things, but I could see myself expanding into website management in the future.

My question is... where in the World Wide Web do I start to learn basic coding and programming?

I have a "For Dummies" book on HTML, XHTML, and CSS checked out... is that a decent place to start reading?

Probably. I take after my dad and use books like that as guides when I run into a problem, rather than studying the actual way to do things.

I learned CSS by commenting out parts of my website code and seeing which part of my website disappeared. I then could figure out how to tweak those sections of code to make it look the way I wanted to.

Firebug is a very useful tool you can use to inspect various elements of websites that you like and see the code for it.

HTML... Me doesn't know very much HTML, you see? But I'm learning. Mostly by just memorizing the tags I stumble across, and learning to tweak it a bit. It's not horribly complicated but I know it can do far more than I've ever used it for so...

You can definitely look at books. I am one of those people that do not really study up on things so much as I do them and then figure out how to correct what I do wrong along the way. Though, if you want to simply go through a tutorial of the basic principles of HTML and CSS, I would direct you here and here.

You can learn a lot simply by looking at actual web pages, and then copying the code and tweaking/playing around it until you understand.

HTML/CSS actually aren't that hard to learn, especially if you take them at their own pace. recommend at least looking through the links at this site:
http://www.w3schools.com/
They have tutorials for lots of web stuff including HTML/CSS--it's VERY helpful.

eruheran

At least 4 people have recommended w3schools to me now. Someone else told me, "Just keep reminding yourself that it's not that hard." And so far, it isn't.

Thank you very much for the suggestions! I'm usually more of a trial-and-error learner as well, so I will take the advice and play with some actual code at some point. For starters, though, the book is helping me understand what I'm looking at. I want to try the w3 tutorials once I'm done reading.

I've finished a few chapters and have made and locally viewed my first webpage. It's flawed, but I "made it myself."

Thanks again!

And find out which friends know the aforementioned languages, and ask them when you get stuck. I had to add that since everyone else already suggested w3schools. That is where I learned.

And google. Never underestimate google. Always turn to it. Google is your friend.

I will, Jay, though part of the benefit to my learning coding talk is so that I can understand * certain programmers * when they speak to me.

In all seriousness, thank you very much! I am hoping a working knowledge of programming will make me more useful as a forum member, especially over on HWSF.

Sounds good to me.

Okay... so someone told me that when you're working with HTML, it's called formatting, not programming or coding. Is that true?

It is coding, but it isn't programming. It is markup and formatting, not logic. Same with CSS, but not with javascript (which shouldn't be confused with java).

To go off of Jay, Java and Javascript (two different languages programming languages by the way) will create a program or something that can perform the desirable operation of the designer. HTML and CSS will only alter the appearance and layout of something for the most part; it will not create a stand alone object that operates on its own.

Thank you for explaining that. One of the books I'm using eventually gets to JavaScript, but we're not there yet.

I love javascript. Very possibly my favorite language I know.

I'm learning Javascript/JQuery right now...fun stuff. =)

eruheran

Very much so. If you ever run into troubles, drop me a line. I would love to help you out.

Well, I formatted my first blog post using HTML. It took a few tries to figure out how Blogger handled HTML (you don't need the paragraph tags, for instance), but overall it was much more effective than wrestling with copy & paste. Somebody commended me on it because I didn't go overboard with the HTML just for the sake of practicing.

(Just for the record about Blogger - it can sort of mess you up when you're learning HTML. If you're in the 'Edit HTML' tab, then you can type HTML like normal and everything. But then once you go to 'Compose Mode' again, Blogger takes those tags and try to do things with them that mess everything up So what you need to do is under 'Post Options' (in the new post box) check the box 'Show Typed HTML Literally.' Blogger sets it to 'Interpret Typed HTML' by default, and that's what messes it up.)

That was a very long parenthical statement....

eruheran

* goes and looks * Oh cool, look at that! I didn't know that was there. Thanks, Andrew.