You Can't Learn It All (Today).

I think we did ourselves a disservice a few years back, with a series of How-To book titles like of Learn HTML in a Week! and Build Web Pages in 24 Hours! and so on. The gimmick here was that "everything" you would need to know was presented in little bite-sized packages.

This was well and good, but it did kind of trivialize the process. Geeze, why should we throw bags of money at you for knowing this stuff when any idjit can learn it all in a week, or in twenty-four hours?

But this really is the best way to go about learning the craft. Pick an area where you recognize you are a little weak. Maybe it's HTML, or CSS or some aspect of Dreamweaver you need work on. Okay, start there.

Then, divide and conquer. There is no way you can learn all of this stuff in a single day, but yeah, you can pick up quite a bit in twenty-four hours, if you go about the task in a systematic way.

How to decide to proceed, then, is really up to you. Maybe you will want to learn everything in the File menu, first, then move through the other menus. Maybe you will want to learn as many keyboard shortcuts as you can, first. Maybe you want to pick up everything you can regarding text, type and fonts—the words on the pages, how they get there and how they are formatted and so on.

Some chunks of Web work lend themselves to this approach quite readily. CSS in particular seems well suited to learning all of the text and graphics, first, and then the positioning stuff. It may take only a short while to get your brain around font-size: .9em; but quite a bit more mental calories to digest position: absolute;.

In just a short time you should find yourself knowing a good deal more about whatever area you were focused on. And then a marvelous thing starts to happen—you start to gain confidence in your abilities. Not only your ability to control the size of text on a page, but quickly in your ability to learn everything else you don't already know about text. And when you ultimately know all there is to know about formatting text, and move on, you start to develop that terrific Web developer swagger that drives the chicks wild. You know what I'm talking about.

You can't sit down and write a novel. But you can string a few words together and build a sentence. And you can make another sentence and another and build a paragraph, a page, a chapter and, ultimately, a whole book.

Learning to build Web pages is the same way. Start small, and make a goal of learning two-dozen HTML tags, and then move on to CSS or whatever else you need help with.

You can't really learn everything in a day. But you can learn an awful lot in just a single hour, and you can apply that to what you already know and, ultimately learn it all. Even if you make a vow to only learn a single new thing every day, at the end of a year, you'd be three hundred and sixty-five things smarter than you are, now.

Let's get started, huh?