Overview
What to expect
This tutorial is advertised as covering everything you need to get a website built from the ground up without any previous experience. So here's what I'm going to try and do and the assumptions I'm making:
Goals:
- Help you get a development environment set up on your machine
- Get you familiar with working in the shell (AKA the command line)
- Get you familiar with some basic code; specifically Python
- Get you familiar with HTML and CSS and how to create a webpage
- Explain some of the basic architecture and patterns behind most modern websites
- How to combine all of these ideas with the webapp2 framework into a full website
- Explain how to actually get your project pushed up to Google App Engine
Assumptions:
- You have little to no coding experience
- You have briefly skimmed over the Command Line, Vim, Python, and HTML tutorials (under the External Resources to the left)
- You have no or little web development experience
- You have your own computer to develop things on
- You are using the OSX or Linux operating systems (this tutorial will still be useful for Windows users, but untested - some further work might be required by you to get it working)
- Most importantly: You will be following along with a command line prompt, and will take your time going through some of the more extensive sections. It would also be very helpful (once you make it to the Hello World section) to have the example checkpoints open on GitHub.
This tutorial is structured as follows:
- Following the Guide provides everything you need to know from writing and running your first line of code, to deploying your website to Google App Engine.
- The Checkpoints are six instances in time where I snapshotted the example app I built and provided all of the code at that point in time. The first checkpoint is the most basic code required to display "Hello World" in a browser while the last checkpoint is a full fledged, interactive blogging app.
- The References are bulleted point versions of some of the information in the Guide covering different tools and commands that are useful but might be easily forgotten.
- External Resources are other great tutorials and documentation (not written by me) that should be used to further learn each tool that I very basically cover.