Hi All,

I have a person in my team that has indicated an interest in web development. He currently does IT Support and crystal reports development.

We are a small IT team of 4, and I could do with a person that has web development skills, to write some small web front ends (data entry) for internal purposes.

I asked him to go away and think about some training courses. He came back with the following courses:
HTML : Introduction (including XHTML and CSS techniques)
http://www.xpertise.co.uk/courses/course.aspx?pageID=18483

Javascript Programming.
http://www.xpertise.co.uk/courses/course.aspx?pageID=6741

Is this enough to be able to create a web app and simple read/write access to a MSSQL DB?

Are there better technologies to learn (e.g ASP.NET) because I think HTML and Javascript are old hat compared to newer technologies?

Should he take some theory first like some "Introduction to programming" type course before moving onto a chosen development platform.

I was hoping he would come back with ASP.NET as we are Microsoft house here, and it would tie in with other products we use such as SQL2005 and .NET, however he is new to programming (other than some formula writing in crystal reports) and I am concerned he might get overwelmed with all thats involved with the .NET framework (heck I wouldn't want to start out using .NET if I had never programmed before!).

This is the first opportunity I have to make a developer in the team, other than me, and I don't want to mess it up.

Your thoughts and advice on how I can nurture this persons desire would be grateful!

ASP.NET is a server side technology.  The actual webpages are still output at HTML and JavaScript so he needs to understand those before anything else. By all means have him take those courses first.

Along the line you will also at to look at a VB.NET or C# course to get the basics of a .NET language as those are what "code behind" is written in under ASP.NET.  After that he should take an actual ASP.NET course which will tie it all together.

_____
Jeff
It's never too early to begin preparing for International Talk Like a Pirate Day
"The software I buy sucks,  The software I write sucks.  It's time to give up and have a beer..." - Me

I think it is also critical that he take a course in T-SQL. If he is going to be accesssing the db, he needs to know the proper way to query it for performance.

"NOTHING is more important in a database than integrity." ESquared