Web development self learning

Hey there web dev nerds, I need your help please please pl0x

I'm currently interested in applying for web/software developer apprenticeships. I have basic knowledge of how websites work and know very basic HTML/CSS through self learning (although this was a while back).

I haven't been practising or learning any web dev recently though, and I have definitely noticed that a lot of apprenticeship postings are asking for (or at least prefer you have) basic knowledge etc. of html/css/php/javascript (and sometimes sql).

Please can I get some suggestions of websites/apps to checkout to refresh + expand my knowledge on these languages so that I'm well equipped to at least apply for some of these apprenticeships.

I have stumbled upon 'The Odin Project'... any idea if this is a good place to start or are there better resources out there for me to teach myself?

Thanks for reading and taking the time to respond if you choose to do so.

(edited 5 years ago)

Reply 1

winterscoming

The odin project seems fine -- realistically speaking there are loads of resources out there which can all help, and it's usually good to pick up from multiple sources because no single resource can teach you everything you need on its own. Everything you learn boils down to the hands-on practice of actually just sitting down with the tools and writing code for yourself, and solving problems through your own research (google and StackOverflow are extremely important when you get stuck or don't understand something). It's really useful to watch videos and read books/blogs/tutorials, but nobody ever learned to be a web developer just by doing that - it's all about the active effort you put into it.

You can access everything for free on Coursera. Here's a series of really good introductory web development courses from university of michigan:
https://www.coursera.org/specializations/web-design
(Alternatively, the same content available on the Lecturers' own site rather than coursera here: https://www.wd4e.com/ )

Ignore the paid-for certificate options. Click on individual course links (e.g. https://www.coursera.org/learn/html?specialization=web-design ) and when clicking the 'Enrol' button on the individual course, choose the 'Audit' option to unlock all the material for free.

There's also a follow-up course here by the same Lecturers: https://www.wa4e.com/

You could try these as well:
https://www.codecademy.com/
https://www.youtube.com/user/derekbanas/playlists
https://www.w3schools.com/
I'd recommend setting yourself a goal of building your own website / web apps and working on your own projects; you'll generally find that the best way to learn is to get stuck into something by yourself and apply your skills, then learn to become a 'master' in Google-archaeology to dig up information about whatever particular problem you're trying to solve at any one time.

Lastly, Mozilla is home to the "official" documentation for web technologies, so you can expect everything here to be complete and correct, but not necessarily always beginner-friendly: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn

Do make use of other peoples' code that you find online, but make sure you understand what that code is and how/why it works as well -- sometimes you can learn a lot by lifting someone else's code snippet and trying to dissect it in your own project to figure out what it's doing.

Also be persistent - you need to spend a lot of time trying to rephrase the questions you type into google - the exact information you're looking for will rarely just fall out of the first link you find (although StackOverflow contains tends of thousands of amazing answers to some very common questions), but more often you'll need to piece together information like a jigsaw in order to understand how something works. (I cannot emphasise enough how important StackOverflow is to anyone learning how to code, it's the most important website on the internet for anyone doing anything related to software engineering)

Lastly, I'd encourage you to always "dig deeper" and be curious. You can learn how to create something using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, but it also helps to learn the underlying mechanics of how a browser works, how a web service works, how HTTP works, etc. Also remember there are always many ways to solve the same problem, and you'll often find that there are "good" and "bad" solutions (where "bad" solutions are usually the ones where you end up inadvertantly shooting yourself in the foot without realising until it's too late to go back and fix it) -- experience will eventually tell you the difference between good/bad, but the internet is also filled with advice of why you should and shouldn't do things in a particular way, and sometimes the 'easiest' solution to a problem ends up being the one which causes you tonnes of really hard problems later on for reasons which are obvious to a seasoned engineer but which may be hard-to-digest as a newcomer.

(edited 5 years ago)

Reply 2

XXIII

Original post by winterscoming

Thank you very much for the detailed response, much appreciated. I think I'll defo make a start on TOP and I'll check out all the links you've provided as well. Gonna grind it out this weekend.

Reply 3

HucktheForde

basics

html
css
javascript

front end
vue or react or angular
nodejs
typescript
photoshop
jquery

backend
php
python or ruby
sql
xml

Reply 4

sr6y56fsdf

PHP is a great language to get started on and very popular, a great framework to learn is Laravel. Checkout laracasts lots of videos to help you get started, also cover some of the more complicate stuff.

Reply 5

DipperDolphin

Hi there, you'll need at the least CSS, JavaScript and HTML. You can learn these via Freecodecamp, which is a great resource.

For front end, currently React is a very trendy framework - you'll want to learn that, jQuery, Angular and VueJS. Gulp is also quite popular.

For back end, I would also recommend learning PHP - it's a very important language, especially in linking to databases, and MySQL, which is one of the more popular database languages.

Apache is important if you want to do server management.

Source: I'm completely self taught, and my current keep-me-along job is freelance web development, working mostly on front end, with some PHP and MySQL in the background.

Hope this helps, and best of luck :smile:

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