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Both your site and the original post are great starts.

Anyone reading or writing these sorts of fundamental web programming tutorials should look at Philip Greenspun's books Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing and Software Engineering for Internet Applications, both available free online (The latter is a stripped down version of the former, written for goal-oriented MIT students who don't want anecdotes or pretty pictures). They are around a decade old, so they aren't a good source for copy-paste-ready code, but the ideas in the books have aged quite well (from simple things like using "abstract URLs"--URLs without extensions like .aspx and .php, to focusing on the website's data model and user interaction instead of the programming language).

The most interesting part of these books is that they explored creating web applications for a purpose, not as an end in themselves. They were written for the sort of people who evaluated their past year not on what their manager wrote in some HR form and the raise they got, but on what they were able to accomplish, like creating http://scorecard.goodguide.com/. (What's funny is that in Greenspun's ITConversations interview (around 4:20 http://web.archive.org/web/20130729213414id_/http://itc.conv...), he said that the parts of Phil and Alex's Guide that aged were not the technology, but the rampant idealism in the book that web applications would unleash a new age of enlightenment, like the academics who had believed television would be used to broadcast Harvard lectures around the world).

Here are the chapters on HTML: http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/html http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/html

And the closest to describing HTTP and frameworks: http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/server-programming http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/basics

(It just occurred to me that Philip's interview above is one day short of being 10 years old, and his assessment might be worth revisiting. The internet still contains volumes of crap, but the internet as only grown as a teaching and community building tool, with sites like Meetup and Facebook organizing learners and teachers, Khan Academy and Udacity doing organized classes, and StackOverflow collaboratively solving specific problems).




Thanks for the recommendations, I'll be sure to check them out.




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