1 Programming for the Web

This chapter provides a conceptual overview of programming for the web. It is intended for readers who have done little or no web development. It covers the core concepts of web-based programming, which can be mysterious for new web developers. It also explains how websites are published and gives some advice about the tools that you will want to have on your computer to support effective web development.

This chapter won’t teach you how to program. However, it should make learning to program a bit easier by clarifying how all the pieces of a website interact together. This chapter does aim to give you enough background knowledge that you can start building the experiments in this book. One way to learn how to program for the web is to build the experiments in this book, tinkering with them to test and extend your knowledge. Another approach is to read this chapter for the overview and then invest some time learning the basics of programming for the web by completing one of the many high-quality online courses/tutorials. I won’t try and provide specific course and tutorial recommendations here, given how frequently they appear and change, but a quick search should be sufficient to find many good options.