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katharine horlick
2,146 Pointswhat language should I learn to build a website?
I want to build a website that operates a bit like depop, my users will need to be able to make accounts, upload photos, message one another and make online payments. I have started learning HTML and CSS. Is this sufficient or do I need to learn more complex languages like ruby too? If so what other languages should I be looking at? Any responses would be massively appreciated! Thanks!
2 Answers
Justin Horner
Treehouse Guest TeacherHello Katharine,
You can certainly use your existing HTML and CSS skills for the front-end work of your application. If you want to write the back-end yourself, you will also need to write back-end code that can talk with a database to store user accounts, photos etc.
If you want to leverage a cloud platform for your back-end, you might be interested in a service like Firebase. You can get sign up for free and get started building your app. You can scale the back-end services as you see fit over time.
I hope this helps.
Kevin Korte
28,149 PointsHtml and Css are a great start, but you will need to use at least one back end language to build what you desire. Html and css are great at structuring and organizing content, but you need away to store and retrieve data to show.
Ruby is certainly one option, and an option I'm fond of. However, even today, PHP is massively popular choice, especially among newer developers, and rightfully so, there are seemingly more php lessons and tutorials out there than anything else. My favorite php tutorial guy is https://www.youtube.com/user/phpacademy
We've touched on Ruby, Python is also a popular and viable option, and even the newcomer Node can pull this off if you're more comfortable writing javascript for server side. Yes, that's right, Node runs a server, in the familiar front end language of javascript.
It really comes down to using what you're most familiar with, and most comfortable with. If you're not familiar with anyone, maybe spend 30 days, and spend one week on php, one week on ruby, one week on python, and one week on Node, a sample platter of sorts and see if one talks to you more than the others.