Moving past Notepad

Okay everyone, let’s get to it.  So you’ve decided that you want to do some web development, that’s great, now all you need is something to write it on, and no I’m not talking about a computer, though you’ll need that too.  What your looking for is an IDE, now don’t let the acronym scare you, it stands for Integrated Development Environment, and I’m sure you’ve heard of a few before, Notepad++, Adobe’s Dreamweaver, Sublime Text 2. An IDE is just a tool to help you program easier and faster.

Let me first start by saying I was a film maker, that’s what I wanted to do, I fell into web design almost by accident and the less code I actually had to write, the better.

If you are just starting out the easiest place to look for somewhere to code in already on your computer, in windows you can use Notepad, on a Mac TextEdit. The end result of coding on these will be exactly the same as if you code on an IDE that costs much more, so why should you shell out the bucks? Why doesn’t everyone just use Notepad? Because once you get past the “Hello World” stage of your programming you’re going to want some help. These programs give you code hinting, make it easier to keep track of your files, have snippets of already written code that are just a button push away.  So which is the best, where should you start? I’m afraid that the answer to that is to try some and see what feels comfortable to you, but I’ll tell you where I started out when I first started coding.

Let me first start by saying I was a film maker, that’s what I wanted to do, I fell into web design almost by accident and the less code I actually had to write, the better. The first time I started coding I used a program called Microsoft Frontpage, and it was terrible, it completely threw me off because Microsoft had added something to it called Frontpage extensions, these were snippets of code that were created specifically for this program and couldn’t be used anywhere else, what I learned from Frontpage was, don’t use Frontpage, luckily Microsoft saw fit to end this product so no other newbies will fall into this trap.

The next IDE I used was Adobe’s Dreamweaver, version 4, though it was owned by Macromedia at the time.  This was a good platform to learn on because it let you do a split view, code on one side and a simulated rendering of what the code would produce on the other.  The problem was the simulated rendering wasn’t exactly how the final page would look in your browser, and I spent a lot of time trying to move things about in the design view and trying to keep away from the code as much as possible. It seemed a lot easier to grab the object you wanted in the design and move it to where you wanted it and let it write the code, this was the biggest handicap I could have given myself. For at least two years that is how I did my “coding”, push the button to add an image, move it around, change the color with the color pallet, there was very little coding involved, only when things didn’t go right did I have to roll up my selves and look at the code that was being produced.  Then one day I decided that I was going to turn off the simulated render and just create a page from scratch in the code view, well it didn’t go exactly how I wanted, but it went pretty well, and it took a lot of the guess work out of it.  I still use Dreamweaver, now version CS5.5, but I have moved on to another IDE for most of my projects. Named Sublime Text 2, not only is it cheaper than Dreamweaver, it has a lot of code hinting tools and ways to speed up your coding process, like self closing tags for instance.

So what does all this mean, well for a person just starting out in the web world, I think that Dreamweaver is still a good option, but beware of relying on buttons and the design view to heavily.  If you want to be a good web developer you need to learn how to code, and if you are going to learn how to code, you need to do it and not let a machine do it for you.  For coders who already know what they are doing, I think that Sublime Text 2 is a great editor and I highly recommend it.

Well if you’ve made it this far through my rambling thank you, and if you’ve got a IDE that you’d like to recommend for newbie or expert let us know in the comments.


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