Getting Started

The first thing to understand when starting a journey towards a future as a Web Developer, Web Designer, SysOps, SysAdmin, DevOps, etc., etc. is to understand your own long-term goals.

This book will help provide resources, information, references, and possibly lots of name-dropping for some of the biggest names in Drupal, Web Development, Web Design, and IT Automation.

What this book will not do is help you, the reader, understand your best path to your personal goals. I can only outline a path, it is up to you to decide where your steps take you.

In This Chapter

The focus of this chapter is knowledge.

If you are ready, willing & able to dive right in and start a website, feel free to jump forward to Chapter 3, 4, or even (where your first site is created) Chapter 5.

For those of you still reading (and thank you for that), I will reiterate something here that you'll see many, many times over in this book:

Come for the Code, Stay for the Community

If you learn nothing else from my book, learn that support is available for all skill levels at any time, anywhere.

If that lesson passes by your alley, instead re-read the message "No man is an island". The last few years (especially after Node.js became super-popular) have seen a heavy rise of the 'Just in time' or R.A.D. (R.apid A.pplication D.evelopment) philosophies. Knowing how to research and debug using the tools available is more important sometimes than anything else.