Web development skills
A student wrote to me: “As a second-year student in Computer Science, I am following your blog regularly to learn about industry’s trends and advices. I want to develop a career plan to ensure that I will have a good future when graduate. Based on your advices on the blog, I am learning English and also take additional trainings in soft-skills. My question is what kind of technical skills I need to have to ensure that I will achieve my education goal. If I want to work in a web development company, what do I need to know? Please advice.
Answer: I am very glad that you are preparing for your future. Having both English language and soft-skills would give you a very strong position in meeting your career objectives. From the technical aspect, you will need to develop strong programming skills and knowing at least two programming languages.
Currently Java is the most popular one. It is designed to be an object-oriented language that allows developers to write program that can be used in any platform due to its platform independence aspect. You also need to know JavaScript; it is a language that supports both object-oriented and functional programming styles. It is very popular in web browsers so that client-side scripts could provide user interaction, browser control, asynchronous communication, as well as the capability to alter the displayed document content. Another popular language is C++, an object-oriented programming language used in system software, device drivers, and high-performance client-server software, or you may learn C# a simple object-oriented programming language that is used in most of Microsoft products.
Since you want to work in web development area, you will need to know about ASP.NET a server-side Web application framework that was widely used by Microsoft to allow developers to create dynamic websites, Web applications and Web services. Today, ASP.NET is very popular in the implementation of Web-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application suites, electronic payment processing systems, and data management systems. Another scripting language that is very popular in web development area is PHP (Personal Home Page – Hypertext Preprocessor), a server-side scripting language that is most commonly used for Web development. If you are working in the Web development area, you need to learn the Hyper Text Markup Language, or HTML5, the key building block of the Web used for the creation of Web pages. Any standard Web browser such as Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Opera or the mobile Dolphin browser, reads HTML-based documents and converts them into Web pages by reading the HTML tags to interpret and display the contents of the page. By creating apps using HTML5, anyone can access the same data regardless of the Internet-connected device they are using.
There are two other technical skills that you need to learn: The XML (Extensible Markup Language), an open standard markup language which is used to define a set of rules for encoding documents. It is often used for the representation of data structures to provide users with the capability to interoperate and share data records more effectively. The SQL (Structured Query Language) a language that is used for managing the data in a relational database management system (RDBMS) to allow users to insert query, update and delete data, as well as create and modify schema creation and data access control.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
