Preface

When I was 16, I was having a ball, secretly recording my friends’ catchphrases and turning them into Flash soundboards. I was slicing and dicing garish designs in Photoshop and putting together websites with HTML tables in Dreamweaver.

I spent a long time away from the web, training to become an architect. But I always really missed the buzz of building websites, creating something from just my own code and having it appear on screen and do stuff, so when I finally graduated I made a U-turn—I decided I wanted to get back into the web.

But, boy had things changed! We had CSS, web standards, and JavaScript, and PHP was the hot server technology of the day. I voraciously learned everything I could about WordPress, Joomla, Zend, CodeIgniter, and all the big frameworks and content management systems of the time. I made some pretty decent sites and landed a job as a junior developer. The truth is that I had no idea what I was really doing. My understanding of what was really happening was minimal. These frameworks did so much magic for me . . . and were so big that I felt totally lost.