At any given time you could narrow down the repertoire of programming skills a developer for the web has to what is essentially the LAMP stack, including Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. It goes a bit deeper than that though, although the additional languages which should be mentioned are hardly some of the most difficult through which to master Computer Science, but it does indeed take some skill to learn how to integrate HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript into the LAMP-stack you’d be coding in.
I mean if you wanted to study HTML alone, the standard official book length of one which covers the fundamentals would be 500 pages, at the very least. The same applies for JavaScript and in fact the number is a little higher for JavaScript. CSS is often just paired with HTML and JavaScript is often touched on in any book covering HTML because of just how dynamic websites have become these days. You hardly ever get a static website which remains exactly the same as it was when first loaded by the server.
It’s all the extra bits a web programmer has to do which make them earn their stripes and essentially complete what is never-ending and thankless job, such as considering the coding which goes into making something like the Bet calculator you would use if you’re an avid online gambler and want to work out the odds of the free bets you would be awarded as part of a promotion.
I can sort of feel myself getting a bit too technical, but the point I’m trying to make is that the job of a developer or programmer who programmes for the web really is a thankless one. There is so much more they do, with the danger of them being thought less of probably coming from the fact that when people compare the work of a web programmer to that of someone like a game developer, it just looks like the game developer’s work is a lot more sophisticated.
In many respects it is, but thanks to game engines (many of which are open source), a huge chunk of their work is already taken care of by mere virtue of deploying and integrating a gaming engine for the specific genre they’re developing a game for.
So much more than what meets the eye and what is suggested by the mind happens in order to bring you the experience of a simple-looking webpage loading and allowing you to interact with it. You’ll be shocked to take a peek behind the scenes to see tens of thousands of lines of code which are really just there to make one simple procedure happen, like how the information you submit through a form is processed when you complete the simple act of clicking the “Submit” button!
Granted, as with game developers and the engines they deploy, a lot of the code used is in actual fact code that is re-used from an existing library, just so that you don’t have to re-code the same procedures every time you require to run a certain procedure again.
