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I'm a long time hobbyist programmer interested in getting into web application development. I have a fair amount of personal experience with various non-web languages, but have never really branched over to web applications.
I don't usually have any issues learning new languages or technologies, so I'm not worried about which is the "best" language or web stack to work with. Instead, I'd like to know of any recommended resources (books, articles, web sites, maybe even college courses) that discuss web application design: managing and optimizing server interaction, security concerns, scalability, and other topics that fall under design rather than implementation.
What would you recommend for a Standalone Application Developer wanting to branch out into Web Development?
There is a wide variety of web application languages you could get into. The ones I have most experience with (and therefore will be talking about here) are PHP, eRuby and Ruby on Rails. All of these have good tutorials available on the internet - I'll link to some of them below.
Which to choose depends on exactly what you're looking to do. Using PHP and eRuby you have to do most things yourself - whereas Ruby on Rails will do lots of stuff for you (useful, but can also be dangerous if you don't know what you're doing). Ruby on Rails is good for doing database related things - for example the standard CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) application. The standard kind of app Ruby on Rails (often abbreviated to RoR) tutorials teach you is a blog application (Create entries, Read entries, Update entries, Delete entries) or an Address Book Application. It is possible to do many of these sort of applications almost in one line of code - using RoR's 'scaffold' function.
PHP and eRuby make you do more of the work yourself - but this can be better in some situations. PHP is more well known and used than eRuby, but I like the Ruby language so I tend to like using eRuby. These are both good for doing simple applications (like contact forms on websites) or more complex applications (phpBB - a piece of forum software is written in php).
As for which one to choose - I'd have a play with them and see what you think. Try running through the first few bits of a tutorial with each and see how whether you like it or not.
Here come the links to various tutorials:
PHP
PHP 101
PHP Intro from W3Schools
eRuby
Beginning eRuby - not great, but shows you how you can embed it in HTML
Try Ruby in your Browser - helps you learn Ruby which you need to know for eRuby
Ruby on Rails
Rolling with Ruby on Rails - the latest 'revisited' version for the latest version of RoR
Rolling with Ruby on Rails part 2
There are a few tutorials to get you started. Some of these take you through installing the necessary software (webserver and anything else needed - eg. php or ruby) and some don't. A good way to get Apache (webserver), MySQL (db) and PHP installed on windows is to use XAMPP. If you're on linux then apache, mysql and php will be in your package repositories and there may be distro specific guides to setting them up.
A lot of languages have web counterparts. JSP for Java, Rails for Ruby, Django for Python, etc. That might be a lead.
If you want to go for the platform with arguably the biggest user base (and with that, the biggest pile of tutorials and examples), go for PHP.
I strongly advise on looking into various frameworks though. For every web-oriented language there's bound to be a lot of resources that take away the trouble of writing all the low-level plumbing code, so you can focus on the stuff that matters. Personally I almost exclusively use .NET, but I've heard about a bunch of nice PHP frameworks, like the Zend platform and CakePHP (for MVC development).
If you intend to also use javascript in your applications to give that nice web 2.0 feel to your applications, please, use a library that hides the messy browser details. You'll go nuts if you try to do all the cross-browser scripts yourself. Some good ones are Prototype and jQuery.
Eloquent JavaScript and AppJet offer great tutorials that allow you to follow along while you learn.
Once you cover all the basics, Ajaxian should answer many of the questions you have about application design, etc. Not only do they post many excellent articles on these topics, but you should explore many of the sites they link to, as these sites usually also provide a wealth of info.
When it comes to server interactions, know your options. Ajax isn't all there is. Research technologies like Comet and JSON-RPC, as well as looking at various server-side frameworks that provide easy access to JavaScript such as DWR, Jayrock, or any tool that exposes your functions to JavaScript using whatever language you choose to use on the server.
Related
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_application_frameworks
Since we are ambitiously aiming to be big, scalability is important, and so are globalization features. Since we are starting out without funding, price/performance and cost of licences/hardware is important. We definitely want to bring AJAX well present in the web interface. But apart from these, there's no further criteria I can come up with.
I'm most experienced with C#/ASP.net, PHP and Java, in that order, but don't turn down other languages (Ruby, Python, Scala, etc.).
How can we determine from the jungle of frameworks the one that suits best our goal?
What other questions should we be asking ourselves?
Reference material: articles, book recommendations, websites, etc.?
For me, the most important things to consider were:
Fantastic lead developers who I trust to keep working on the project.
Googling a question brings a lot of good answers.
Most importantly, I have to like the way the code flows.
Edit: Also they have to be anal about coding standards. If there is inconsistency, I get very annoyed.
Those 3 points brought me to Symfony. It is always using the latest cutting edge features of the latest PHP version. Symfony 2.0 is using namespaces before any other framework.
Two of your points were:
i18n - there is great support for it (helps that the company behind it is French, so i18n is a first class citizen).
Scales - Yahoo Answers and Vimeo use Symfony and contribute back code. If those guys can scale Symfony to 100 million users, you can too :)
It all depends on the type of project you will be developing.
Are you building a web application or a heavy content website or something else?
You also mix up programming languages with frameworks. The frameworks for PHP that I know are: CakePHP, CodeIgnitor, Zend and Symfony. For an out-of-the-box heavy content website I would suggest Drupal or Expression Engine.
It seems you won't be developing yourself. In that case I would determine the cost and availability of programmers and how widely the framework is supported and by who it is backed. The Zend framework is backed by the guys behind PHP, while CodeIgnitor is backed by the guys behind Expression Engine. Drupal has professional support packages,...
IMHO, for something that will have a lot of users, go for a compiled language.
If you don't try it, you will not know. So, I'd say do a small project in each of the frameworks you are seriously thinking about. I would prepare myself to do a lot of testing if it's something I'll be maintaining for some years. It's better to start off on the right foor than to get half way through a project only to realize you took the wrong path. There may be some requirements that end your search. For example, your servers' OS, a framework feature, or scalability. If you lay out your software plans and requirements, you probably will have very little left to choose from - unless your project really is quite generic or simple.
I am very curious about what you think is the best approach for people that want to start webdevelopment. I'm now talking about people that finished their education and so want to start from scratch.
I still have questions like:
Where do you start?
What software gets involved in webdevelopment?
What tools / setup would you recommend?
Offcourse i'm interested to hear alot more then only the answers to those three questions.
I am not writing this to get a load of people react on my post, i am trully interested in knowing how much work and money it will cost a webdeveloper when starting from scratch.
I hope to get a clear view on how to approach and to maybe hear some best practices.
Well one thing's for sure, education isn't finished! There's a whole lot to learn, and the more we learn the more we seem to need to learn.
If you're really starting from having no programming background whatsoever then I think you'd be advised to take a staged approach. For example:
1). A web page with a few different text formats and pictures and colours. Here you're just learning HTML. For that any browser and a notepad editor would do, but probably a tool such as Eclipse that gives some HTML editing capability would help.
2). More adaptive HTML - stylesheets that let you change appearance without changing all the html. So that's CSS.
3). Using the above, improve your designs. There are loads of formatting tricks good web sites use and you'll need to learn those.
Note that by now we've done a lot of study and we have not actually written any programs!
4). Dynamic web pages. Now we move to the programming side, rather than just writing some HTML files write a program that delivers the HTML and in some way changes the content. Starting with something really simple such as including "today's date is ..." on the page. For that You would need to pick a server development technology such as Ruby/Rails or PHP or Java/JSP ... You'll get a lot of different advise about "best" for this.
5). Now you can start to work on accepting input from the user and doing something with it so that useful work gets done. Things such as databases start to become important.
There's a whole load more after that, JavaScript and so on. An experienced programmer can pick up this kind of stuff quite quickly, if you've never done any programming at all then you will need to be prepared to take a while before you can get to the level you probably target. I think the key is to acknowledge that a great commercial web site reflects a lot of collective wisdom and skill picked up over many years, and probably is the result of a multi-disciplinary team working together. For one person to match that is a big ask. For one person to produce something nice and useful is more practical, but still does need a lot of different skills. It's quite reasonable to specilaise in a subset of the skills. For example, good visual designers write little or no code but are highly valuable.
you need:
a browser, eg. FireFox, Internet Explorer. A webdeveloper toolbar might also be useful.
a webserver, eg. Apache, Tomcat, IIS
a programming environment, eg. Php or ASP.NET
a development tool, eg. Notepad, Notepad++, Visual Studio .NET, Eclipse
most of the times a database, eg. SQL Server, mySQL
I'd say it depends what you want them to master: the technologies only (up to which skill level ?) or the whole software engineering behind a web project
A sample and fast technologies learning tree could be:
1) HTML
2) CSS
3) HTTP
4) Server side programming (PHP ?): programming concepts, interacting with HTML/CSS, then PHP API
5) Databases (start simply with MySQL for instance) + SQL (CRUD with Joins, Subselect, Indexes, Views and Transactions)
6) Client side programming (JavaScript first then Ajax)
7) A web framework (ZEND ? cake ?) and a good IDE (lots of...)
Full-time learning those technologies requires at least 1.5 year , based on the experience I have with my students and people must be trained mainly on concrete projects.
Then people should learn software engineering (cf link text) covering at least
- software requirements
- software design
- software construction
- software testing
I think people can have useful experience in this software engineering tree in 1 year and can (should) combine learning technologies with learning software engineering.
For training someone from scratch (technologies + software engineering) I'd say a least 2 years if working on at least three 6-month projects
This answer is Microsoft specific.
For starters you'll need an editor, a (optional) database and a few starting points.
Microsoft supplies most of these for free: you can download the Visual Studio Webdeveloper 2008 Express Edition for free, this includes most of the stuff you'll need.
If you plan on developing database driven websites, and who isn't, you might want to use the free SQL Server 2008 Express Edition
When you have the tools setup it's time to download some samples and see see how they work. Again Microsoft supplies some for free. You can check out tutorials and samples at their Asp.Net site.
When you are ready for some more advanced stuff, check out ASP.NET MVC, again at Microsoft.
With these tools and examples you should be able to get started.
I just want to add that you will most likely also need Photoshop or other tool to create the graphics for your web sites.
In spite of java/.net/php,the HTML,CSS,JavaScript are the basic web development toolkit.
Get a job as a junior developer that will put you on a project that is developing a web application. I personally think it should involve one of the two most established platforms, Java or .Net. I know some will disagree, but these are good foundations to branch into other tech platforms later.
Make sure you open an IDE (e.g. Visual Studio or Eclipse) everyday and code something. If not, find a new job immediately.
Read religiously at night. Start with "Code Complete", then move on to other books.
Learn the fundamental technologies of the World Wide Web:
HTTP
HTML
CSS
JavaScript
DNS, URL's
Good luck and happy travels!!
you need:
a google chrome . This provide you some advantage like inspect option. A webdeveloper toolbar might also be useful.
2. Html, Css, JavaScript are the basic language that you should be know
a programming environment, eg. Php or ASP.NET is needed for storing data and making login type page
a Visual Code Studio is needed for coding. This provide you emmet facilities that suggest you while you are coding
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I have tons of experience with both Rails and Django. I now have some spare time to do some learning. Which emerging web development framework I should learn? Thanks!
To be honest: Just pick one. There is no right way to learn such stuff. The web is evolving in a chaotic way, what is good today might be bad tomorrow.
And no one can give you the answer as everyone has different experiences and preferences.
May advice would be: Pick one you have heard of and evaluate it against those you already know. What are the weaknesses, what are the strengths? What are advantages and disadvantages for you as programmer if you use it? If this involves to learn a new language, even better. Maybe this language follows other concepts/paradigms. It will "widen your horizon".
In the end, what makes you a good programmer is not, that you know as much frameworks, languages, whatever as possible, but that you understand the concepts and that you can apply them easily to the new/unknown.
To get to know which frameworks are available in general, this is not the right places to ask IMHO (-> Wikipedia).
Nobody than you can decide what you should learn, it heavily depends on your background and interests. You don't have to be afraid of learning something "wrong". Every bit of knowledge is useful in the end and will contribute to your overall understanding of the techniques.
asp.net mvc.
Will get you some perspective from the strongly typed world...
Here are two "low-level" frameworks, that I found really interesting to do stuff with:
web.py, which claims to be the "Pythonic" way of doing web related stuff in Python (has even a positive quote from Guido van Rossum)
Node.js, that uses Google Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine for serverside JavaScript
Both are "low level" in the sense that they don't provide as much features as Django or Rails but leave you with a maximum of freedom to code your way in the respective language.
I would recommend ZK if you're interested in AJAX frameworks.
Take a look at the Agile Platform by OutSystems.
You can download the free version at http://www.outsystems.com/download and follow the interactive tutorials.
Cheers
Michel
Disclaimer: I work at OutSystems
You don't say anything about what language, but for something really different, you could try Nitrogen or Erlyweb written in Erlang. I am not saying these will be the "next" frameworks, but they sure should be!
Zend seems to be the choice in the PHP world. Not that I'd recommend anyone to learn PHP, mind you...
If you want to try something that is oriented towards building the kind of complex interactive applications that would be a nightmare to build in Rails or Django, my recommendation is Seaside
Zend PHP framework.
Php is the most used programming language on the internet and ZEND framework is the most mature framework for PHP.
Instead of looking at yet another server-side framework, how about a client-side framework? Web development is gradually moving towards the client. Being able to build web apps that run in offline mode will be a required skill before you know it.
Try building a web app with dojo or extjs, using the server only for hosting index.html, a bunch of js files, and a few web services. Make the entire page generation happen in javascript. For bonus points, skip server-side logic entirely, and build an app that stores data locally, using the server only as a static file store.
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Recently I found out that the company a friend of mine co-owns uses 4D, which I've never heard of before. They swear by it, but they're non-technical and what they say about it sounds like memorized marketing blurb. Unfortunately the 4D website also seems devoid of any actual information and is filled with words like "comprehensive", "solution", "platform" and "integrated" instead.
Since that thing is rather expensive and uses a custom language that I don't have much inclination to learn just for one project, I'm cautious about it and I'm wondering if anyone had any experience with it? Would you recommend it? What is it good for? What competitive advantage would I gain by learning it as a programmer, or using it as a company?
4D has been around for a long time (~25 years), so it's much older than e.g. MySQL. Think of it as a professional version of Microsoft Access: It has its own Pascal-inspired host language, its own relational database engine, a very mature IDE for rapid GUI development and a custom runtime which allows for true "write once, run anywhere" (anywhere being Mac OS (X) and Windows, that is). Nowadays, it also understands SQL, there's a server version and even an integrated web server. It's fairly powerful, so the comparison to Access probably does not do it justice.
Today, I believe it's mostly used for legacy apps which are as old as 4D is. I don't think I would learn it again today, much less start new projects with it, since you can get the same functionality and then some by stacking up open source components.
I used to do some very serious 4D work, one of the systems I wrote is still in use as an enterprise system about 16 years later. I got frustrated because they were taking years to come out with the new object-oriented version of the language and I was writing thousands of lines of code to use a third-party table control.
4D delivers cross-platform, very high-performance client-server systems using a proprietary server. The database model is much more set-oriented than SQL and pulls the sets all the way into the core language. It does a nice job of delivering code to the clients because it compiles all procedures to native code which is cached locally and updated on-demand when it is out of date.
The language and GUI environment have their quirks but the flip-side is that there will probably be a good living to be made from supporting it as a legacy platform. if you can get someone else to pick up the tab for the tools, it may be a useful addition to your consulting toolbox. You have to consider how much business-specific code is gonna be out there for a unique product with that long a history!
An engineer for whom I have huge respect was recently hired by 4D which says a lot about their commitment to the future, hiring this kind of guy.
I've been working a lot with legacy systems recently, doing a port from old Mac stuff to WPF and the contrast between the mostly-unused complexity of Visual Studio and old Mac tools reminded me of 4D. I'm also porting my OOFILE C++ database and reporting frameworks to REALbasic - the OOFILE set-oriented operations came directly from what I loved about 4D and this too made me think I was too harsh in this answer originally.
The thing to remember about 4D is that it was set-oriented from the beginning (written by a mathematician) and much easier to use for many things than SQL. The deployment model of 4D Server is a superb combination of desktop app and network provision - compiled components are cached on the server and automatically sent to a client when needed. There's no need to shutdown or actively push or deploy updates. The GUI model of 4D was frustrating but looking at the site today, they have solved most of the issues that I had to use third party solutions for years ago.
Avoid it like the plague. My company uses it and it's just a constant exercise in frustration. It performs no where near as well as the sales pitch would have you believe, and documentation is either non-existent or not helpful.
In my opinion, there is no reason to begin learning 4D unless you want a simple database app and are unable or unwilling to learn how to create GUIs in a bigger language. The main advantage that 4D has is that the built in functionality between the UI and the database can handle most of what is needed. If you want something quick, small, and inhouse, you can get by with 4D but if you need to develop a powerful commercial application you will run into a few walls. If you need something that 4D doesn't provide automatically it will be very difficult to get it working.
I consider the language completely archaic. It works for what it does but our product has become limited by the language and database itself. We keep running into weird quirks and have to code our way around them.
I have experience in 4D 2003 and 2004 but we haven't upgraded to the latest version because of the costs. It is extremely expensive. Each customer needs to buy licenses for each computer that needs to run the software. Our product costs over $1000 for a new office because of the licenses. When a new version of 4D is released every single customer has to pay to upgrade their licenses.
After looking at https://www.4duk.com/products/ataglance.html, I'd recommend you stay clear - it looks like one of those products that's going nowhere.
It reminds me of the time I was made use a development platform called Witango - absolute nightmare to use, and all apps had to be rewritten in .NET very shortly afterwards.
Invest your time learning something more mainstream/employable.
Avoid at all cost. 4D used to be a good Mac database twenty years ago but is obsolete today. Extremely expensive to deploy and poorly supported. I have used it for many years and have since moved to Real Studio for cross-platform database development, which has a more modern language and a far more active developer community.
I'll be wary of investing too much into something like this. On the good side, if that's what your company uses learning it will pay dividends. But the skills you learn will be hard to use in other places.
I think more than half the replies over here are inaccurate. I know of more than 20 companies with over 1000 users. And I believe there are a lot more.
With 4D v12.1 (www.4d.com) you can easily deploy at the click of a button for single-user, client server, Mac, Win. And there are easy to setup plugins for integration with Flex, iPhone and Android OS. Their KB and documentation is very neat and comprehensive.
They have a great engineering team and the support from 4D and the online community is just fabulous. I have been using 4D for several years and I have no complaints.
4D as someone else pointed out gives you a fully integrated backend database and frontend. The client server connections are stateful so you dont need to worry about record handling and client server session handling.
At less than $1000 per year it is not expensive and you can deploy unlimited single user apps. Which other propreitory development platform gives you that?
I am sure Real Software has its Pros and Cons too. There are many choices nowadays and there are many ways to skin a cat.
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Let's say I woke up today and wanted to create a clone of StackOverflow.com, and reap the financial windfall of millions $0.02 ad clicks. Where do I start?
My understanding of web technologies are:
HTML is what is ultimately displayed
CSS is a mechanism for making HTML look pleasing
ASP.NET lets you add functionality using .NET(?)
JavaScript does stuff
AJAX does asyncronous stuff
... and the list goes on!
To write a good website to I just need to buy seven books and read them all? Are Web 2.0 sites really the synergy of all these technologies?
Where does someone go to get started down the path to creating professional-looking web sites, and what steps are there along the way.
While I have built my knowledge largely based on using the internet to search out what I want to know (w3schools.com helped a lot, as did A List Apart), a few good books have helped me along the way, though they have been platform/language-specific, so I'll avoid mentioning them unless someone is curious. For me, at least, having a book open so that I don't have to resize windows or switch between them is very valuable.
The first part of your list is ok, but the last few items need tweaking. ASP.NET adds server-side functionality (for the most part) to your application. This lives outside of the browser and is thus quite powerful and easily shared with a variety of end-users.
The problem (some say) with server-side processing is that your application must make a new HTTP request when you ask for an action to be performed. So if you click on a link to a page that yields a new set of data, you don't get instant results. The page reloads, or loads a separate page.
Javascript solves this to a degree--it allows you to respond to user input instantaneously. Do you want to display the sum of two numbers when the user clicks a button? You can do it with Javascript.
The problem with Javascript is that it can't talk directly to databases, or explore your server's file system, or other stuff like that. It lives in the browser--period.
AJAX bridges the gap between your user's browser and your server. With AJAX, Javascript makes the HTTP request without refreshing your page or loading a new one. Javascript talks to a server-side script (not necessarily ASP, either--works with PHP, Rails, Coldfusion, etc.) and sends and receives information. And because Javascript isn't dependent on page loads, a quick, snappy AJAX script can almost give the feeling of a common desktop application, in which you don't have to wait for HTTP requests when performing simple actions on your application's data.
I think that this series of Opera Articles will give you a good idea of web standards and basic concepts of web development.
2014 update: the Opera docs were relocated in 2012 to this section of webplatform.org:
http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/Main_Page
Ian's answer has a lot of weight. You could buy all those books and read them all and know nothing about web development. What you really need to do is start with something that is not nearly as big as Stack Overflow. Start with your personal site. Read some web dev/css articles on a list apart. Learn about doctypes and why to use them. Add some css and change the colors around. Go over to quirksmode and peruse the site. Add some js. Follow some links on Crockfords site. You will probably stumble across his awesome video lectures, which you should watch. Then after that go back to all the js that you wrote and rewrite it. Then pick a server side language that you want to learn. Python is pretty easy, but it really doesn't matter what you pick. Then come back and integrate all those together in your site. At this point you will at least be getting started with web development and will have worked with several different technologies.
EDIT: I forgot to mention. READ BOOKS.
Many developers that I have worked with in the past have gotten through their career without really advancing after a certain point. I could be totally wrong, but I attribute it to not reading enough books and relying on using their same bad code over and over.
You could go out and buy a bunch of books and start reading them and quickly get overwhelmed in the seemingly massive learning curve it takes to go from nowhere, which is where it appears you are, to a rich internet entrepreneur, which is where you want to be.
Alternatively, and what I would suggest is, you could define a problem you want to solve, and then go about finding the solution to that problem. Start with something small. "I have a problem: I don't have a web site about myself.". Define what you need to do to solve that problem, learn the basics, and do it. Then, define a new problem, which probably relies on the solution to the first problem, find what you need to do, and do it.
This is how all technology professionals evolve. My first website was a personal site with nothing but text. Then I added some jokes and some movie quotes. Then I got tired of man-handling all the updates to I learned how to put them into a database and retrieve them from the database for display. It goes on and on.
Call me when you've got more money from your financial windfall than you know what to do with.
If you really just want to jump in with both feet, I would suggest looking at ColdFusion from Adobe. The developer edition is free and runs on windows, os x and linux. The documentation is authoritative and extensive, there is a very active developer community and only a few books you might want to dig into. The definitive guide is a series of books that can be found on Amazon
The nice thing about ColdFusion is that you can use it as a stepping stone to other languages and remain productive along the way. You can even mix it together with Java since it is itself written in java. There are also lots of goodies built in that you would have to scour the web for or pay more for in other languages. Things like full text indexing, graphing, server monitoring, ajax based controls, flash/flex integration, asynch os calls, etc.
You even have the choice of building object oriented code or procedural code, although some people would not count that as a benefit. Those people rarely agree on which style should win, though.
Cheers!
I think sitepoint is the best resource for learning best practices in web development. They have great articles, good references, and probably one of the best forums. However the people there can be a bit grumpy. ;)
If you are a real nerd, reading the specs for HTML 5 and CSS is also a good way to learn.
I'm with Ian on this one. Reading books is all well and good, but nothing beats getting stuck in. I actually started with a Dummies Guide to ASP (that'd be "classic" ASP), back in 1999.
If I was going to start from scratch today I'd be looking at something that covered a full stack solution, whether Apache/PHP/MySQL, RoR or whatever.
ATM I have no experience of Rails, but it might be a pretty good place to start as it includes a lot of stuff that you'd have to figure out early on otherwise (integration with a Scriptaculous, a JS framework) - you can always learn what going on under the hood at a later date.
.NET is always an option, and if you're comfortable with Visual Studio it may be the way to go, but it's not the easiest thing to pick up otherwise.
If you know a bit of HTML but are basically new to server-side programming you might look at ColdFusion. It's actually extremely powerful and like Rails includes lots of "out of the box" benefits. There's a Swiss company called Railo who are currently in the process of releasing an Open Source ColdFusion engine that is affiliated with JBoss.
Last and not least - don't forget databases! Sooner or later you'll need to get to grips with some pretty serious SQL...
CFML (aka "ColdFusion" even though that's really an Adobe product, not the language) is definitely easy to learn, and if you want FOSS for CFML, in addition to Railo you can use Open BlueDragon which is a GPL CFML engine.
Designing with Web Standards is a great first read!
http://www.zeldman.com/dwws/
I would recommend this book:
http://www.amazon.com/MCTS-Self-Paced-Training-Exam-70-528/dp/0735623341/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1218830714&sr=8-1
I have just read it to take the exam, and although I knew the web theory part, I found it to be of great value.
This of course is a ASP.NET specific book, but that is what I would recommend learning anyways.
After you learn all the ASP.NET stuff, I would suggest reading up on JQuery.
Happy coding :)