Why is HTML & CSS a must for First Year Engineering Student

Students join B.Tech and then they start wondering what to learn, how to learn, where to start with? A considerable amount of precious time gets wasted in all this search. Some of the students get to understand in sometime, some of them never get it at all. 

For those who are totally new to computers and programming, HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) would be a boon (a great advantage), because of these reasons:

1. It is very easy to learn.
2. It takes very small time investment.
   
3. You can see the results of your work immediately in any browser.
4. You can start this on any Operating System, and no hi-fi IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is required.

OK! So how to get started? 

I suggest you to install Notepad++, its a free editor and supports many file formats including HTML.

Now go through these links to get a basic idea of HTML tags - 

1. http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_intro.asp 

2. http://www.codecademy.com/glossary/html#lists_unordered-lists 

On the link 1 above, you shall find a series of small tutorials which are easy to understand. Also, there are exercises given in the mid. You should try to attempt those. 

Once you are clear with the usage of all basic HTML tags, try to create an HTML page representing your profile. It should contain 

- About Me

- Profile Photo

- Educational Details

- Address Details

- Interests

- Linkedin Profile Link

Make this HTML page in Notepad++, and open the same file in a browser (e.g. Firefox). Whenever you do any changes in the notepad++, just save it and refresh the browser. You will be able to see the changes. Also, remember that your HTML file should have .htm or .html as the extension.

HTML gives the content to a webpage. But, it would be all black and white, not looking that great. So, to spice it up and make it look good and attractive, we have CSS (Cascading Style Sheet). Using CSS, you can define classes; classes being a group of styling which you want to apply to an HTML element. The advantage of using CSS is re-usability and easy maintenance. E.g. if you define a class "rb" with styling as float:right; font-weight:bold; then you can use the same class to apply these styling to any number of HTML elements.

You should read more about CSS here:

1. http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp 

2. http://www.codecademy.com/glossary/css#properties_margin

With the increasing power of Internet, everything is coming to Web. It becomes very important for any person to learn and understand how these Websites work, and learning HTML & CSS is the first step towards it. In the coming posts, we will also talk about how achieving functionality in your webpage by scripting (Client side & Server side).

So keep reading and look for more ...