> The amount of stuff you have to learn all at once as a programming beginner is really overwhelming when you are just writing a simple local program, never mind adding all the complexity of networking and deployment and server config and the half dozen web techs.
You don't need to know more than HTML, CSS and PHP to "get started", and you can learn those one at a time, in that order - and once you know those 3 you can keep progressing, learning one thing at a time.
When I was younger and learning programming, I had an extremely hard time seeing what I could do with it. I was working with C and Python, which lends itself to simple command-line programs - but at the time I had no experience using command-line programs, so I had no idea what sort of thing I'd want them to do.
Things I had experience using, GUI programs and games, had a far higher barrier of entry and/or a much steeper learning curve. Now, I'd have a much easier time, I could separate the UI from the logic and write unit tests to have a sense of progression, but as a beginner, those things are out of reach.
The first really useful thing I wrote was an IRC bot in python, but even that was incredibly difficult. I had to work with sockets, threads, events, character sets... I don't even think I had a server to run it on, so I just ran it on my desktop machine that was on all the time anyway.
Compared to when I discovered PHP a few years later, it was immediately clear to me what I could do with it. I had experience using a lot of different websites, so there was a lot to draw inspiration from, and the barrier of entry was really low.
You don't need to know more than HTML, CSS and PHP to "get started", and you can learn those one at a time, in that order - and once you know those 3 you can keep progressing, learning one thing at a time.
When I was younger and learning programming, I had an extremely hard time seeing what I could do with it. I was working with C and Python, which lends itself to simple command-line programs - but at the time I had no experience using command-line programs, so I had no idea what sort of thing I'd want them to do.
Things I had experience using, GUI programs and games, had a far higher barrier of entry and/or a much steeper learning curve. Now, I'd have a much easier time, I could separate the UI from the logic and write unit tests to have a sense of progression, but as a beginner, those things are out of reach.
The first really useful thing I wrote was an IRC bot in python, but even that was incredibly difficult. I had to work with sockets, threads, events, character sets... I don't even think I had a server to run it on, so I just ran it on my desktop machine that was on all the time anyway.
Compared to when I discovered PHP a few years later, it was immediately clear to me what I could do with it. I had experience using a lot of different websites, so there was a lot to draw inspiration from, and the barrier of entry was really low.