I'm not a complete computer amateur, in the past I have studied a fair bit of sql, vb.net, php, etc.... nonetheless I have never had the opportunity to use any of this in an actual real world website. Now I have decided I really should step up and I want to make a website with a database...and I've no clue where to start. I am assuming that making a database the easy way with microsoft access is out? I've looked into something called web matrix but it seems more trouble than its worth. Lots of little niggles. Even renaming a table or creating a relationship is difficult ; to rename I had to do a query! I've also heard mysql is the typical thing online but...I've no idea how on earth people use this. You make your database purely via sql in a text editor and it draws on it online? The database I have in mind is quite a complicated one. A list of users, a list of countries, a list of areas of those countries and various different bits of data which should only pop up if a user picks one country or another....so the simpler the simple stuff is the better really. Just figuring out the database in my head requires a lot of thought! Though yes, I should learn to walk before I run so just getting some basics up and running so far would be good- I'm just worried I might head down a dead end getting my basics done and make something which is utterly useless when I want to do things properly So....yes. Where should I be starting for figuring out how to cobble together a heavily database drawn website? I'm not doing any e-commerce or anything serious here, its mostly just a learning experience/bit of fun for myself, so getting the best stuff is not important at all. Nonetheless I do want to figure things out- my university taught me nothing useful.
you could start yr self from learning SQL ; http://www.w3schools.com/sql/default.asp and also few front end programming AS A GUI for your project.
MySQL is the generally advised engine to start with in your position. Here's what you're going to want to do. Get MySQL installed, get a webserver installed (Apache/IIS) and get PHP installed. Once you have all of those installed and working, go grab a copy of PHPMyAdmin and install it in a web accessible location. Now, you have a way, through your browser, to visually create/modify/update your databases. I know I'm simplifying the steps here but that's the basic overview that you want to start with. Once you have your database in place and have a structure you're happy with, it's time to start writing code to make use of this data. Good luck!