yet another language! [closed]

Question

I took a sabatical from programming for about eight years and now that I am back and developing a Sharepoint Intranet, I am so utterly lost.

I know HTML and have basic VBA programming experience but in my previous years, of course there was always a good design view of webpages / applications so you could actually SEE the parts you were building. Not so in SP2013....It is straight up code and that's fine but...

where do I start language wise? I thought Visual Studio would be good for me since I dabbled in VB Script & VBA but honestly, I am so overwhelmed with the mentions of css and aspx that I am unsure where my focus should be.

It almost looks like CSS has taken over web apps....should I start with, brush up on that to make this experience easier? I have had no issues creating a site and putting in simple add ins, columns, calendars, etc....

But what I really want to do is get my hands dirty and change it up. I hate the basic layout, I want to add better tabs in the header, change the default column sizes, etc....but silly me, I figured with my background I could look at & copy/paste a little code and be fine....what a slap back into reality, lol

SUGGESTIONS? (besides a Miller Lite and some Excedrin)

Answer 1

Focus on Client Side coding, like JavaScript. As Microsoft's focus is shifting more and more towards cloud, it will be the prevalent technology used to talk to your (SharePoint) sites.

Microsoft Virtual Academy is a great place to start. Also, MS is offering 6 months worth of free Pluralsight training with VS Dev Essentials (sign up, on dashboard you see after sigining in click "get code" and then activate in the Pluralsight block).

Answer 2

I would recommend client side code to begin with (JavaScript). It really depends what you want to build, but you can accomplish a lot without heavy coding. Also download SharePoint Designer. You might be getting a little ahead of yourself by going straight into Visual Studio and developing custom solutions.