Credits: Unsplash
20 year-old here. So? So nothing, just don’t punish me for having an opinion that flows against the tide of articles “experienced developers” write. I started with HTML & CSS when I was 17. From then till now the web development journey has been amazing. Creating things masses uses, making code contributions to popular repositories that are being used by millions of developers is surely a feeling of joy very few get to experience. You will surely have a good time if you truly continue web development for the rest of your profession. Now coming to the learning part it is as follows:
After getting versed with the basics of web development that is HTML & CSS there are 3 main possible areas you can master into: The Front-end , The Back-end, or Full-Stack.
- For being into the Front-end zone: You need to have solid grasp of HTML, CSS & JavaScript. For JavaScript I would suggest you to start with either “You don’t know JS” a book series available on GitHub for free or take the Codecademy , freecodecamp course on it. Don’t dive into jQuery or any JS framework/library before you feel your vanilla(plain) JavaScript basics & fundamentals are clear and have practised it good enough. After that you can explore the HUGE AMOUNT of JavaScript frameworks available out here and go with one which feels right for you. Unsolicited: You will read many opinions on why you should select X instead of Y , but select what you feel is correct for you. The very popular of them being Facebook’s “React” for which “Wes Bos” has the best tutorials. The new upcoming strong contender to React is “VueJS” for which vuecasts.com is the perfect course to begin with. There are so many of them I got tired even by just thinking of them. There’s also a thing called Node JS , which I will leave to you to explore. (But just don’t yet)
- For Back-end: Front end being most of the UI part, back-end as you might have guessed is the server side lab. You have multiple options here: PHP, Ruby, etc. Try first with PHP I would say. To begin with, laracasts.com has the fantastic “PHP PRACTITIONER” course. After getting good with the basics and fundamentals practice the Object oriented approach. It would not only help you with PHP but also with other programming languages as well. For the Database stuff , you need to understand SQL. Codecademy’s course on it is a good free one to start with.
GIT : Git is a version control system. This is the thing I if somehow possible would have voted for to be a standard in web development right after HTML & CSS. I would recommend again the Laracasts for it. Jeffrey is the right dude to teach you this.
- Full Stack : Well this is what the experienced devs like to call themselves who could do all the above with some knowledge of Servers as well. It comes with experience. For me Full Stack dev is the one who is aware of all of the above and focuses on one particular not all of them and keeps juggling. But when needed could do the other thing for you.
These are the starting points for all of the possible routes. You yourself will explore and pick the next step for you automatically.
Yes this field doesn’t requires a specific degree. I was able to get the position of Development lead while being just 20. This was so because I had a decent GitHub profile & good amount of knowledge with a particular PHP framework called Laravel. You might be thinking what’s this thing called GitHub now? GitHub is like the social network for developers. Social coding it is. You can put your code for people to have a look at. You can see others code , contribute to that , and the fun continues.
I would recommend not spending money on certifications but rather on good video courses like the above and building things you can show in your portfolio or the things that will help other developers or someone in some way :)
Who knows the next social network people use is by you. Not just social network, web development will teach you much more than this. Happy coding and if you ever feel stuck there are tons of helpful people out here to help you out. Ask! Question everything you learn. Cheers!
In case you have any doubts you can reach out to me on Twitter @introwit