Welcome to the second instalment of my blog series: A Journey to Become a Web Developer. In the first post, I gave you an overview of my journey so far. In this post, I would like to talk about the first steps in that journey: Learning to Code. I will talk a bit about how I did it, the mistakes I made in the early stages and my recommendations and tips I would give to anyone about to start this journey to become a web developer.
Have a goal to work towards
You will know from my last post that I started investigating web development and very quickly got distracted by game development. Although I had a goal, it wasn't strong enough and there was no deadline. On the other hand, when I was informed that I would be taking on the intranet at work, I had four months to learn as much as I could. This gave me the drive and determination. So, my first tip/recommendation: set yourself a goal and tell someone that will hold you accountable.
What language should I start with?
As you know I started with PHP because this is what my work's intranet was written in. Although this is a good starting point, I would not recommend it if you would like to be a ‘back-end’ developer. When I was given the source code and looked at it in detail for the first time, I realised that I needed to know more about HTML and CSS. There were HTML tags that I did not recognise from when I first looked at HTML way back at the beginning of my journey. So, my second tip/recommendation: learn HTML and CSS first. HTML and CSS are the building blocks of the web. You can develop all sorts of static websites with them.
Where to learn HTML and CSS?
Everyone has their own style of learning and, with the internet, you are not short of content. If you like reading, there are books, blogs and documentation. If you are like me and learn better by watching, there are many options on places like YouTube and Udemy. It can be a bit confusing, even intimidating, looking for that first tutorial because of the sheer amount of content out there. So let me try and start you off with the resources I started with.
When I first started looking for video tutorials, I stumbled upon Brad Traversy's YouTube channel Traversy Media. I found that when watching the videos I instantly understood the content. The way things were explained just clicked. I feel that this is very important when looking for tutorials. Brad has crash courses for HTML and CSS. These are really good and free, but if you would like a bit more in your learning, I would recommend his Udermy course: Modern HTML & CSS From The Beginning (Including Sass). Not only does this course go deeper than just the basics, but there are also projects to help put it all into the context of real-world examples. A resource that I use for referencing and reminders when working on a project is w3schools. This is an amazing site, not just for HTML and CSS. I strongly recommend you check it out.
There many other good resources available. Find what works for you. Here are a couple of other YouTube channels I have used recently:
- Design Course this channel is amazing for design concepts. I'm not naturally a designer so I have found this channel really helpful.
- Kevin Powell has some really helpful short videos targeting small topics mainly to do with CSS.
- Free Code Camp I have only briefly browsed their YouTube videos, but have seen a lot of people recommending them.
Tutorial Hell
Tutorial Hell is an expression that developers use to describe when you are stuck just doing tutorial after tutorial. So I have a challenge for you to help avoid this situation. Once you have completed the basics in HTML and CSS, and this is my third tip/recommendation: try building a website for a company. You can pick the company. It could be real or fiction. Pick an industry you know a bit about. Give it the following pages:
- Home
- About
- Contact
If you decide to put a contact form on this page, don't worry about making it work, just make it look good. This is an exercise just to practice your HTLM and CSS skills. Once you have done this, I would love to see what you come up with so please do share in the comments below.
Whats next?
So you have got to grips with HTML and CSS and you have completed your first private project. My fourth tip/recommendation: learn Git. Git is a free, open-source version control system. I won't go into GIT too much in this post but will explore why I recommend learning it early on in one of my next posts. But for now, here is a link to a good crash course to get you started.
So to summerise,
- Set yourself a goal and tell a family member or friend who will help you and hold you accountable
- Start with HTML and CSS first
- Once you finish the basics build a small website with three pages and share it with us
- Then have a look at GIT
Good luck and have fun. Don't forget you can flow me on Twitter @mikepagedev . Until next time - keep coding!
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