Bengfort.com

Yesterday I substitute taught a class for my adviser- TL 725; a graduate level class for computers in logistics (TL stands for the Transportation and Logistics major). My job was to teach a brief survey of HTML and web development to a class of pure beginners- their task was to build a website and later on to convert their sites to e-commerce style web sites. During the course of the class I realized two things: anyone can learn the basics of web development, and not only that everyone should learn the basics of Web Development!

Here is the deal: everyone in our family uses the Internet from everything to getting directions on Google maps to online grocery shopping, to instant communications, to sharing pictures. We even have a dedicated server all to our own family! The Internet is such an ingrained thing in our lives, yet we treat it as a mysterious thing that we can only know the surface of, even if we are perfectly content to have it as an necessary part of our lives.

I see a strong parallel to cars. Cars are so ingrained in American culture that 15 year olds own them- and really it is their first major purchase. From 15, we eat, drink, live, even sleep in our cars (and possibly other nocturnal activities!), and spend close to 5% of our day (1.2 hours) in them! (I spend close to 17% of my day in the car…). Yet only a select few Americans spend anytime building cars, or designing them. However, all Americans do know some very important things about cars:

1. The basics of internal combustion
2. How to change their oil
3. How to fill their tires, and check them
4. What technologies they want need to buy for better performance

We should treat our knowledge of the Internet the same way! We should know the basics of client server relationships (internal combustion), we should know how to change our il (write HTML), we should know how to check and fill our tires (formatting with CSS), and we should know what technologies we want when we need better performance (JavaScript, PHP, ASP, MySQL, etc). This basic overview will give us a better Internet experience, just like the car knowledge gives us a better driving experience.

To that end, and for the class, I wrote an introductory survey to Web Development, its only 10 pages long, but I wrote it with you guys (my family) in mind! I would highly encourage you to read it and respond with comments to me! Also, check the links in the appendix of the document for further tutorials.

The survey can be found here:
[Link to be updated soon]