Nowadays web development is a good skill. You can earn by developing websites. I'm going to give you all the steps and technologies and tools that you need to learn, right now, so you can become the best web developer possible in 2020.
We first need to talk about the tools and technologies, you need to download. To get started with web development, you need a little bit of stuff installed to become a web developer. Luckily, these are pretty easy.
Web Browser:
The first thing you need is going to be some form of a web browser. You can use Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, as long as it's a modern web browser It's going to be fine. Don't use old technology-based browsers like Internet Explorer. Make sure you use something as modern and going to work with all the new technologies.
Text Editor:
The next thing that we're going to need is a text editor. I use Visual Studio code, but you can use any text editor. You can start with the sublime text, notepad++ even you can start with an online text editor, it doesn't matter. I just recommend Visual Studio code because of how great it is for when development was made with web development in mind. It is perfect for web development.
Version Control:
The next thing that you're going to need is going to be some form of version control. This just means that when you make changes to your code into your website, you can actually save those different versions. It is really easy to go back if you broke something and go forward and save things and so on. It just makes working with changes so much easier. I recommend using Git, it is by far and away from the most popular version control out there. I would use git combined with GitHub, for all of your version control needs. Also, you're going to need a terminal to be able to access Git and all of your different versions. If you're on Mac or Linux, the built-in terminal is great, but if you're on Windows I would recommend using Git Bash, which actually comes with git. When you download git, you're going to get a terminal called Git Bash, so I would recommend using that for all of your different terminals that they get needs.
Now those are all the different tools that you're going to need to download for web development, so we can finally start jumping into what you need to learn for web development. And unlike most people, I recommend the very first thing that you learn with web development is the different types of web developers out there. There are actually tons of different types of web development, namely front-end back end and full-stack development.
Front end:
I'm going to first talk about if you decide to do front-end web development. This is what I recommend for most people when they're starting since it's easier to learn, and in my opinion, more enjoyable. Since it's very visual. And you can see exactly what you're doing. If you want to be a front-end developer the most important thing, you're going to need to learn is going to be HTML, it's essentially what allows you to make the websites. It's how you put all of your content on your website. Once you understand HTML basics. You can move on to CSS.
CSS is a huge concept, there's a lot of advanced topics for CSS. CSS is going to be what allows you to style your website, it's going to be allowing you to make the website look different than other websites. You can change colors and things positions; you can do a ton with CSS. Combined with HTML, you can make really good-looking websites, and you can actually build tons of websites for different things such as portfolio sites using just CSS and HTML. I recommend learning the basics of CSS, and the basis of HTML as your starting point for front end web development.
From there you can work on deploying your websites. I recommend using a tool like netlify, it makes deploying HTML, CSS sites incredibly easy. You can actually see your sites and give them to other people so they can check out your sites.
The next thing to learn is JavaScript, and this is both important for the front end and back end. Both of them are going to use JavaScript. Either way, in the front end, your only choice is JavaScript, so you need to learn it. JavaScript is going to allow you to do all the really cool things on your webpage, such as making things happen when you click a button, allowing things to move around your page really fancily. It allows you to do all the user interaction portions of your website. This is going to be the hardest thing that you learn in front end web development. In the beginning, you need to learn all of the programming concepts such as variables arrays types classes all these different programming concepts and you need to start thinking like a computer.
Back end:
Now that you know what you need to learn for the front end. Let's move on to what you need to learn for the back end. And this I recommend you run in second. If you already learned the front end first, but you can start with the back end. And the first thing you need to do is your language of choice. I recommend using JavaScript, combined with Node. js, and express. It is going to allow you to make web servers, where you can serve up web pages on the back end. You can choose any language you want, for example, you could choose Python combined with Django, Ruby combined with rails. You can even choose PHP, even though I wouldn't recommend it.
If I were you would choose between either JavaScript with node and Express Oil choose Python and Django. Those are going to be your most popular languages for back end web development, and are going to be able to have the most job opportunities out there. And in my opinion, they're also fairly easy to learn, compared to some other things such as learning Java or any PHP, that can be a little bit more difficult. They may not be as modern, and they may not have as many resources available as JavaScript and Python. Another incredibly important skill for back end web developers to learn is a database. You need to learn some database, whether this is a SQL database, such as Postgres or MySQL, or if it's a no SQL database, such as MongoDB, it doesn't matter. I just recommend you choose one or the other, it is entirely up to you and makes sure you learn that. If you chose to learn MongoDB also learn the basics of SQL for things such as MySQL just so you know the difference between the two.
But really you only need to learn one for these purposes. This is going to allow you to store and save data on your website so that users can save their own data, and then see that data later when they come back to your website. It's an incredibly important skill to know. But you really only need to know, if you're planning to do back end web development since front end web developers don't deal with databases. Now the very last thing to learn as a back-end web developer is going to be deployed, and you cannot use network back with the back end. I would recommend using Heroku, just because of how easy Heroku is, it's incredibly easy to get up and running with a site. I recommend using Heroku, you can deploy your node site or your Python Django site there, it's really easy to deploy up to Heroku, and then you can actually have a site up and running.
There's a ton of more advanced concepts that you can go into of your choosing. So, one of those concepts is going to be version control. This applies to front end web development back end web development, and any form of software development anywhere is going to be version control, you're going to want to learn Git and GitHub, in-depth.
I would even recommend learning this while you're learning the basics of your front end, or back end development, just so you can get in the habit of using version control since it's one of the most important skills, any web developer can learn. And once you understand it, it's actually fairly straightforward to use and implement. Now if you want to become more well versed in front-end web development. The first thing I would recommend is learning some form of a front-end framework.
Right now, the most popular is by far reacting, so I would recommend learning react. You can also choose something like Angular view or spelled, it's really up to you, but react has the most jobs right now. When you learn that front end framework, it's going to allow you to take your apps to the next level and really make it so much easier to find a job. Also, I would recommend learning the very basics of jQuery. jQuery is an older library, that's not really used as much anymore, but it's trendy in older company’s older codebases and you're going to see it with a job. I recommend at least learning the basics, so you can understand what jQuery looks like, and you can read the jQuery code that people are writing. I wouldn't spend a ton of time on it, because jQuery is constantly on the decline.
The next most important thing to learn is going to be advanced CSS concepts, this is going to be CSS Grid CSS Flexbox you're going to do series as variables. There's a ton of advanced CSS concepts, as well as understanding the intricacies of how CSS works, how the position works how the display works, how all of these inner workings of CSS, actually function, and some of the more complex behind the scenes of CSS, like how selector specificity works.
The next thing is going to be single-page applications and progressive web apps. These are quite advanced concepts single-page applications and progressive web apps. I recommend saving those to the very end till you have a really solid understanding of everything else. But essentially, a lot of web applications are moving towards progressive web apps, or single-page applications where everything is done on the front end, there really is not a big back end. It's just an API call so learning about those different things and how to implement them is going to be important for getting jobs going forward in the next couple of years.
Another incredibly important skill for back end developers is security. Understanding how to make sure your database is secure; you don't have SQL injection. You make sure that your admin routes are secure that people can access other people's accounts user authentication, all that is incredibly important, and all that security concern, both on the back-end developer sort of learning about security. Understanding security is really important as a back-end developer. Another thing to learn as a back-end developer that does some full-stack development is going to be a CSS framework. Learning something like bootstrap or tailwind CSS is going to make it so that you can implement good looking websites using the CSS bringers without actually having in-depth CSS knowledge. So instead of mastering CSS like the front-end developer is going to do, you can learn this framework. It's going to allow you to make decent looking websites, with very little CSS skills. It is really useful when you want to focus on back end development over front-end development.
The last thing that I think is useful to learn as a developer is going to be AI and machine learning. These are two different topics that I think are slowly going to make their way into web development, especially in larger companies. So, if you're interested in AI, or machine learning, I highly recommend taking those on somewhere in your learning. This machine learning is going to be done in Python. Having an understanding of Python is going to really help when it comes to doing these machine learning and AI tasks.
And that is all you need to know to be a web developer. But you have to remember there is no end to learning. You have to learn more and more.
