> * One of the things I was working on was using Tesseract to do OCR on uploaded image files. After 3 weeks of trying to get it to work, I achieved about a 97% accuracy, but because of some underlying bugs that I didn't understand, it wasn't good enough.*
Ha, I've been working on this thing too, though I suspect for different use cases. I don't know if you were using this as a general example of how you managed to solve a problem...but this really isn't a "web programming" problem, in that it's a program that has many uses outside of a web server. In fact, it should be a standalone script that has no awareness of the web (unless it's doing something with a lot of moving parts, like recording results and doing machine learning).
In any case, the problem with people trying to learn web programming is that it encompasses many things...I'd argue that web programming doesn't really require learning HTML beyond the basic idea of HTML (and CSS)...and yet many beginner programmers spend a month or so thinking that programming consists of memorizing tags and CSS rules (nevermind cross-browser considerations)...which must be frustrating as hell.
It is a Python script I execute from a PHP file, so it doesn't have any knowledge except for the files that I am trying to scan.
I google just about any HTML issue I have, so I don't spend too much time trying to learn the intricacies of it. If anything, trying to understand why CSS was behaving as it was, was what got me closest to smashing my keyboard more than a handful of times. Stupid Wordpress.
But I don't think it's necessarily a waste of time for absolute beginners to learn and memorize HTML as their first exposure to "programming". Having a fundamental understanding of how making changes to a script or file affects the output to a web browser is something that I imagine most non-programmers aren't familiar with, so having a firm grasp of this concept will probably help them digest more advanced concepts later on. Being able to whip up a web page is probably one of the first things I would teach beginners if I ever taught a course on programming.
Ha, I've been working on this thing too, though I suspect for different use cases. I don't know if you were using this as a general example of how you managed to solve a problem...but this really isn't a "web programming" problem, in that it's a program that has many uses outside of a web server. In fact, it should be a standalone script that has no awareness of the web (unless it's doing something with a lot of moving parts, like recording results and doing machine learning).
In any case, the problem with people trying to learn web programming is that it encompasses many things...I'd argue that web programming doesn't really require learning HTML beyond the basic idea of HTML (and CSS)...and yet many beginner programmers spend a month or so thinking that programming consists of memorizing tags and CSS rules (nevermind cross-browser considerations)...which must be frustrating as hell.