I own a wordpress installed blog and it works quite nicely.Although people using other CMSs such as Joomla , Drupal etc don't really accept wordpress as a true CMS.So, just for adventure and learning **real** web designing I want to learn something productive-it is obvious using wordpress is just as good as spoon-feeding and does not make me learn anything.So,where should I start from.I have a basic background of HTML .Would learning other languages like perl,Javascript and PHP be helpful/is an absolute necessary ?? Thanxx in advance !!
I've been in web development for 14 years and have probably learned 14 languages (if you count HTML, JS, SQL, frameworks, etc as separate languages) so a big part of it is having a desire to self-learn. Many languages out there (such as .Net and Java) are adapted to do web development, but the language carries a lot of baggage and history that makes them harder than necessary to work with. The languages specifically designed for the web are Coldfusion, PHP, and Ruby on Rails. Coldfusion is fast to learn and can do anything you'd want to do, but unfortunately carries a licensing expense when hosting. Rails is a favorite of linux gurus who live in the command line and enjoy compilation processes. PHP is the "best" and I would specifically recommend starting with CakePHP (see: http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en) and JQuery. And I would specifically steer you away from ZendFramework and Dojo as they are "academic" languages not geared for R.A.D. But in the end if you are 'productive' and can deliver sites for people using Wordpress/Joomla/Drupal and learn how to customize those CMSs with custom PHP code, that can be quite valuable and reliable as well. I've found that 'real' web development is necessary when you are doing something innovative or that has 'never been done before' in which case relational database design skills are also very important.