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The Alpha Software Forum Participation Guidelines

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Bonus TIPS for Successful Posting

Try a Search First
It is highly recommended that a Search be done on your topic before posting, as many questions have been answered in prior posts. As with any search engine, the shorter the search term, the more "hits" will be returned, but the more specific the search term is, the greater the relevance of those "hits". Searching for "table" might well return every message on the board while "tablesum" would greatly restrict the number of messages returned.

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Priority of skills to improve

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    Priority of skills to improve

    Just wondering what people think the skill development priority is if one is interested in developing web apps. I'm thinking:

    1. Xbasic
    2. JavaScript including JQuery
    3.HTML
    4. CSS

    I'd appreciate any thoughts.

    Thank you.

    --Rob

    #2
    Re: Priority of skills to improve

    My humble opinion.
    No matter what the platform:
    Put sql/database at the top.

    Comment


      #3
      Re: Priority of skills to improve

      I'd say:

      1) SQL: you need the basics of this from grids to dialogs to reports etc etc. That said, I learned a good bit of these basics just using the Grid query genie and experimenting, but I wish I'd put a little more effort into understanding it on the front end.
      2) XBasic: The grid and dialog components are going to display and do insert, update, and delete statements on the dat in that grid. Anything other than that that utilizes the database or Alpha reports, etc, outside of in-built component features will use XBasic.
      3) HTML: The basics of this will come in handy when you want things to appear above a grid or to the side or you want to stack data in a single column, etc. Use the HTML editor to get most of the basics.
      4) Javascript: A lot of what you'll do is Alpha's "Action Javascript", in which case you won't even see the Javascript being run unless you specifically switch it over to see the text. As I've customized user features I've done plenty with Javascript in my application but it's not complex Javascript.
      5) CSS: You can use the in-built CSS editors to change a field's font size, weight, etc, but you won't get into this too heavily unless you just really want to.

      Comment


        #4
        Re: Priority of skills to improve

        Hmm... I am in a wildly different camp it seems.

        1. Using Debuggers, like Firebug and the xbasic debugger
        2. Read & understand someone else's code
        3. Language specifics & best practices

        I don't really think of "programming language" as a skill. That's all semantics. And semantics are pretty well documented in the wiki/google. Anyone can look up an error code. But not everyone can step through the code (it might not be yours!) with a debugger and pinpoint the problem.
        Alpha Anywhere latest pre-release

        Comment


          #5
          Re: Priority of skills to improve

          Well stated, Sarah. I guess I want to re-iterate that almost all of my database application education came from genies and forum posts, too, and I haven't spent any specific time learning SQL, XBasic, HTML, etc. I would prioritize them in my previous post in terms of understanding what's going on and what the options are for various programming or querying options in a given scenario.

          Comment


            #6
            Re: Priority of skills to improve

            Hi Rob,

            As Skip mentioned above the most important skill is the database and especially the database design. I suggest you to look into a tool that can help you to concur that very quickly named xCase which is a data modelling tool. I use that tool for 15 years and I can't leave home without it.

            Second thing is to do all calculations at the database level while using views stored procedure and computed fields. This way you encapsulate that capability at the back end use it anywhere in the application. Using all calculations at the database level expedite performance by far.

            Regards,

            Doron
            The Farber Consulting Group, Inc.

            Web site: http://www.dFarber.com
            MS SQL Blog: http://www.dfarber.com/computer-consulting-blog.aspx
            Convert Ms Access to Web
            MS SQL Remote DBA
            Alpha Five Development

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