Drupal is a CMS system that can be freely downloaded and used from the Drupal website. It is not an object orientated PHP driven system and so everything is available through function calls and variables.
I have heard that the learning curve on developing Drupal is quite steep, but once you get around this initial hurdle the whole thing is pretty simple. This ease of development means that it is possible to take an idea and use Drupal and all its features as the CMS behind your idea, thus saving you time on your project development.
Drupal works in a kind of framework pattern in that you need to create files and folders in order to extend or overwrite the existing functionality, which is already quite extensive. This can trip up a lot of developers who are new to the system. My recommendation is to get someone to explain the initial steps to you and and then try it out for yourself. However, there is plenty of documentation available on the Drupal website.
From visiting the Drupal website to having a working version of the system on a test server took me literally 10 minutes, including the time it took to download and upload the files. I have used WordPress extensively in the past, but have always found that it can only be customized to a certain extent before you need to start hacking the source code. Although this is getting better with newer versions of Worpress I will be using Drual in my next website build.
Learning JavaScript can be tricky, especially as there are so many things to get wrong in the language if you don’t know what you are doing. It is almost impossible to debug code if you don’t have a very clear understanding of what is going on. The three solutions to this are to read books, watch some videos and to go on a course.
Tuition
If you live in the UK then you can find many JavaScript training courses available, which are held at high quality meeting rooms. Attending a course can help you to get started in the subject and will equip you with the tools you need to continue learning at your own rate. I would really recommend taking this approach with a large and generally abused subject like JavaScript. There are so many ways to go wrong when you set out learning the language, especially because it doesn’t "act" like a lot of other languages. Superficially it might be similar, but if you are intent on writing any serious applications then you need to understand the object model of JavaScript, which many books just miss out.
Books
There are a lot of books available on JavaScript, the majority of which will take a very "look at this, isn’t it pretty" approach to the language. This is unfortunate as this can only lead to people misusing the language to do stupid things in a browser, which is what has happened. However, there are some really good books out there, here are a few that I have read myself and have thought to be very good.
There are numerous videos available on the Internet, but finding the good ones is also a challenge. Here are some very good videos, most are by Douglas Crockford, but I have managed to find some others.
Here is the first from Douglas Crockford to get you started.
Regular expressions are a very useful tool for any programmer wanting to validate input, format strings, change words, reformat data or even split apart a string into an array. However, when you are starting out, writing them it can be hard going, they are not very easy to learn and the only way to really understand them is to practice, practice, practice.
This is where reWork steps in. It is a fully functional online regular expression workbench that will allow you to plug the expression and the text in one end, and it will show you exactly what is being matched. This simple JavaScript program is far better than any stand alone application I have seen and has more functionality than you could even think about.
I have often wondered why a program wasn’t working and found that I had written an expression incorrectly so that the correct string wasn’t being found. reWork has been a real help on those occasions. I especially like the fact that I can get an expression ready and then copy the JavaScript or PHP code from the bottom of the page.
If you are starting out you should get yourself a decent regular expressions book, and then use this tool to see what an expression does and how they work. However, this tool is exceedingly useful for seasoned developers. Go ahead and try it!
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