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You can hover the mouse over acronyms to find out their meaning. I've used the <acronym></acronym> tag on them.
You need:
- free notepad++.Notepad++ is a programmer's editor, so it should be able to handle large files. If you are using unicode, ansi plugins will not work and notepad++ will delete them from the installation area automatically (if it doesn't crash first). the most useful plugins are installed by default and it can edit xml as well as PHP and html files with syntax highlighting too.
- $99-129 Corel Paint Shop Pro (worth every penny). Decent paint program with some vector graphics editing.
- $130 HomeSite 5 or $400 Dreamweaver or other non-html-mangling page editor. If you don't mind HTML mangling, use MS FrontPage Express which used to come with Internet Explorer (may be available from MSDN.microsoft.com)or FrontPage, which is part of MS Office.
- $100 scanner (SCSI or USB). USB should be simpler to plug in and install. There is probably one on your printer, hopefully.
- free Web server package. Use IIS (if you don't mind locking it down) or PWS if you plan on developing ASP scripts or better yet, Apache + PHP + MySQL (called WAMP). The easy way is XAMPP for windows or LAMPP for linux for PHP+MySQL+Apache
- Books: pick your books carefully. different books for different audiences. Expect $15 for a hip pocket guide, and $40-60 for a good solid all-around book.
Get one on HTML or XHTML (everything's going to xhtml) that lists all the tags in alphabetical order and lists all the attributes of the tags and explains them and gives examples of how to use them. You will also want a book that talks about CSS, and possibly another on DHTML (dynamic HTML) if you can handle some programming.
- Imaging: $670 Adobe Photoshop for photos/images and companion $575 Adobe Illustrator CS4. Everybody expects you to use Photoshop, including the newspapers (they want 220dpi b&w).
- $0-150/year Hosting. There are more exdpensive hoisting for $25/mo ($300/yr). Try $150/yr penguinwebhosting.com for PHP+MySQL hosting. 30GB + unlimited BW (most web hosting do not allow MP3's). Other hosting packages using ASP are available if you prefer learning ASP for a job, but they are more expensive ($25/mo).
For free hosting try PHP+MySQL-based 110mb (2GB space), freewebsitespace (1GB space), hostfreeweb (100MB space), or Template-based freewebs (40MB space). The template based site has very professional templates for beginners or people who aren't graphic designers.
- magazines: web designer, and Layers Magazine at Barnes & Noble and Powell's Techbooks
browsers and browser testers/emulators
- Google ‘IE Tester’. It’s a free app that lets you view pages in all IE versions from 5.5 to 8. Normally it is problematic to get more than 1 IE onto an OS at a time without using 1 per OS on VMware.
- IE, preferably the latest version.
- Google Chrome browser
- Apple Safari (requires installing quicktime and itunes and mobileme control panel applet unfortunately)
- Opera browser (free version)
- Firefox or SeaMonkey
- Linux: Konquerer browser doesn't support .net or javascript.
- icefox/Arora browser. doesn't support .net or javascript I don't think.
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