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Me, myself, and Irenne
Me, myself, and Irenne

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front end

Hi everyone,

Been learning python for about a year and a half and I'm not exactly the fastest learner, but eventually something sinks. Anyway been thinking lately, mainly because living below the line ain't much fun, that maybe I should try and learn front end in the hope of maybe building website and maintenance etc. I really can't afford to pay for Adobe stuff and Microsoft visual studio is slow. Where's a cheap good place to start? And cheap, I mean free lol

Cheers tc

Top comments (13)

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pbouillon profile image
Pierre Bouillon • Edited

I would suggest you to build your own webpage.
You will have to make it clean, pleasant and impacting.

You will have to go deeper in HTML5/CSS3, JavaScript to dynamize your webpage and why not PHP/SQL to send email, add a small blog, etc.

Moreover, you can use super "cheap" libraries available on GitHub. Here are some of my favorites:

For the little story; I only knew Python, Java, etc. a few months ago. So, I decided to build a webpage to improve myself (and I went from 'hello world' to pierrebouillon.tech/ with only stackoverflow and some curiosity !). That's why I recommend it to you, because you will learn step by step to build your own image and project, only related to you.

Good Luck and happy coding !

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tcratius profile image
Me, myself, and Irenne

Thanks mate, very nice webpage. Black is my favorite tone, sick of seeing bright white all the time. I saw this on the web and thought it seems cover the theory behind it all developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/L... and I'll check out GitHub latter, no point in re-inventing the wheel. :) Cheers tc

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pbouillon profile image
Pierre Bouillon

You're welcome, thanks for feedback; I would be glad to check your webpage too in a few months :)

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lindelof profile image
lindelof

You can also use these two libraries, whether they are cool with react or vue

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cdvillard profile image
Charles D. Villard

Working in front-end development doesn't mean spending a bunch of money these days. Open-source tools are everywhere. Even Microsoft Visual Studio has a 'forever-free' version in Visual Studio Community 2017. That said, there are a lot of free resources if you want to learn the ins and outs of the front-end.

In terms of what to study, stick with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript first. As a starting point, I would recommend Shay Howe's "Learn to Code HTML and CSS". Not only does he offer lessons on basic and advanced HTML and CSS, but also recommendations depending on where you want to grow.

I would take Pierre Bouillon's advice and try building your own webpage. This will help you get to grips with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. If you want to go so far as to use PHP and SQL for back-end functions, there are some cheap and even free hosting resources available if you look. If not, you can also use free services from GitHub Pages and Netlify as well.

This seems a little redundant, but when I make the recommendation of sticking with just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, I mean just that. You'll run into libraries and preprocessors; don't go down that road too early. You want and need to have a solid grasp on those three languages first before using them, or else you'll lose yourself in gotchas when you're in an environment where you can't use them.

All that said, I do want to caution you about diving right into front-end development. It's still a growing and changing field without a solid definition. From person to person, it can involve any combination of design, structure, styling, or coding. It might mean you just mess with HTML and CSS, or that you work with JavaScript frameworks and Gulp tasks. Everyone has an opinion, and they'll want you to know it.

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tcratius profile image
Me, myself, and Irenne • Edited

Cheers mate, strangely enough I bought his book about 2days ago :) cause I know next to nothing about css and html. Been an interesting read and I can use it with Python and Django so I'm pretty stoked. Some of the template stuff in Django like render() has go me bamboozled. But then again alot of help documentation for coding is annoyingly hard to understand.

PS how will I know a preprocessor when I see one? Lol all good, keep my sober eye out for them. :p

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mervinsv profile image
Mervin

For code editors, just try Sublime Text - it is a free code editor for Php, javascript, html and etc.

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tcratius profile image
Me, myself, and Irenne

I use atom editor, I imagine it's similar to sublime. I just got to get off my arse this week. Picked up a really good book to read >.<

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tcratius profile image
Me, myself, and Irenne

That chat monkey looks cool, thing I'll have to fork that one :D

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mervinsv profile image
Mervin

That was one of my research last year. I created a simple chat application using Twilio and Xamarin. Just give it a try. :D

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jenc profile image
Jen Chan

Email marketing. Not a great place to stay but can pay decently.

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tcratius profile image
Me, myself, and Irenne

I don't have a lot of friends so may not be worth it?

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jenc profile image
Jen Chan

I'm not sure I understand your comment... Why do you need friends to do email marketing?