Where To Start

A

Azrael

Game Owner
Hi I'm Azrael, I've been lurking around TGL for a while now and I really appreciate how kind and supportive everyone is!
So here's the deal, My good friend Revan and I bought Design1online's Pet Game Framework. And while we've been waiting on that to be finished, I've been completing art assets for the our game while Revan preps herself to be lead admin and coder. While we're not giving out any details for a long while, at least until PGF is done, We have a team and we're near ready to begin our journey as a pet sim.

However, I have a personal quest spurred on by my realization that I'll be an admin someday. I want to learn how to code.
I know very little HTML thanks to my years playing sims and designing my own layouts, But I want to learn more. I'm currently looking into CodeAcademy and may take some beginning courses on HTML and CSS there.
But I was wondering, Where are some good online sources for starting out? And what languages should I tackle first? Any help would be appreciated!

 
A work colleague actually told me to use CodeAcademy to learn Python and other languages, not just HTML and CSS. I would recommend learning whatever code that you will be using in your game, as that would be the logical choice to me, but perhaps there is something easier to learn that lets you just drift into what your game uses a lot easier? Might be worth researching that?

Also try to find yourself a coding community, or someone you can ask questions. Artists do this really well, where you bounce WIP's, get critique, ask questions, etc so perhaps find someone or something like that? Or someone to keep you motivated as thats the hardest thing, learning on your own. But with your other admin being a coder that may be easy to find! 

I hope that helps even a little bit. Good luck and don't give up! 

 
I think Pet Game Framework's back-end is PHP so you should learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP. 

A brief rundown of each: 

HTML is what you use to structure your content, text and images on the page. 

CSS is what you use to style your content with colors, sizes, borders, and whatnot. 

JavaScript does many things, but generally makes content on your page change dynamically. 

PHP is what you use to interact with your web server and the databases where you store player data. 

Programming is split into Front-End and Back-End Development.

Front-End Developers work mainly with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and on the look and feel of a website.

Back-End Developers work with languages like PHP, Python and Ruby on the functionality of a website. 

If you can do both, you are known as a Full-Stack Developer. 

Now, where should you go to learn all of this stuff? 

For an absolutely beginner I'd recommend an oldie but goodie: LissaExplains. Though this site is old and has code that isn't really used anymore, I believe its primer which I linked to is a great place to start. The fundamentals of what Lissa teaches (what HTML is, how CSS works, and how to write code) still apply to modern web development. Also it's free. 

My other recommendation is also free: W3Schools. This is a good place to learn about different modern technologies and to find and test out various code snippets right on the website. 

Beyond that? There are plenty of decent places you can go to ask questions should you have them. Just be prepared to either show your coding or provide an example for the people who answer your question to work from.

For that I'd recommend JSfiddle. 

 
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