Recently someone pointed me to Librosweb which has several books on HTML, CSS, Javascript and AJAX. You can read them online or download them as PDFs. The only catch is that they are written in Spanish.
They are provide under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works License. A webmaster-to-be should probably read the books in this order:
These books are complemented with several books on Symfony (a PHP web framework). So together, they should provide a good foundation for a webmaster, or a front-end or back-end web developer. There is also a book on advanced CSS (CSS avanzado) and a CSS reference book (Referencia de CSS 2.1).
Many other web frameworks exist besides Symphony. In PHP you have: CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Zend Framework, among others. In Python: Django, Pylons, TurboGears, etc. Ruby on Rails in Ruby. And others in other languages. My favorite is Django. But more info on web application frameworks in a future post.
Although similar free resources must exist in English, I like this website because they have all of the information in one place, and the books provide just enough information which should allow you to do a multitude of web-related projects.
A similar “curriculum” in English, would probably go like this:
- HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide or HTML, XHTML, and CSS
- CSS: The Definitive Guide
- JavaScript: The Definitive Guide
- Ajax: The Definitive Guide
You can almost never go wrong with O’Reilly, which consistently publishes high-quality books. The “Definitive Guide” books will be more comprehensive references than the Spanish books but also much longer.
As for Symfony, it’s website has a wealth of documentation available in English, and some of it is available in other languages, including Spanish.