Where should you start?
There are plenty of useful online resources
that teach the basics of web development. Sadly though, there’s no single
tutorial that is good for everyone at once. I have selected a couple of
websites that I have been using during my pursuit of becoming familiar with
coding.
Dash teaches HTML, CSS, and Javascript through
fun projects you can do in your browser. The good thing about Dash is that is
teaches the basics trough real-life scenarios, such as “Anna’s friend Jeff
needing a custom theme for his poetry blog”. The code is written in the browser
and the lessons are leved-based. Is indeed is a fun way to learn the basics for
a web designer, sadly however, only four projects (lessons) are available.
Codeacademy is also great when it comes to the
basics of web design. It also offers interactive lessons and it has more
programming languages on the table than Dash. Codeacademy starts with HTML and
CSS lessons (they call them Fundamentals), which is truly the right selection
for the beginners. After the Fundamentals are completed, you can choose to
learn jQuery, JavaScript, PHP, Python or Ruby.
I also like Codeacademy because of two
separate parts it has while teaching coding: theory and practice which is
devided into web projects or APIs. This means it works both for complete
newbies and for ones that want to go dig deeper.
While Treehouse is paid, this learning
platform has a huge selection of both programming languages and systems (such
as development tools or design) to choose from. Treehouse also features videos.
It also has Tracks – different goals that you may set for your lessons such as
Becoming a Web Developer, Becoming a Web Designer or Learning HTML and CSS. It
is very useful if you’ve got a spare buck.
This set of tutorials is a very popular one.
w3schools features both tutorials and references – the latter are often being
explored even by experienced web developers. The website features lessons for
popular languages and technologies such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL, PHP and
jQuery. It also teaches servers, databases and other vital stuff, it has more
than a thousand of code examples. It’s free. While Dash is somewhat better for
newbies, W3S is very handy even for the professionals.
While JavaScript is somewhat advanced and I
would not recommend it for you as the first technology to learn, it is very
good to learn if you want to work on making web plugins or mobile apps. This is
very much in demand right now, so it’s a handy programming language to know.
Learn-js.com is your first port of call should
you decide to go JavaScript. It features an interactive board that allows to
try the code you just wrote. The lessons are both basic and advanced.
What else?
Every developer knows stackoverflow that
has millions of questions and a similar amount of answers, plus a vibrant
community. It has saved billions of man-hours and it will definitely save some
of your time.
Speaking of communities, Mozilla
also has a great one with lessons and tutorials widely
available.
And of course, you should check net tut+ with
thousands of tutorials for most of issues and challenges beginners may come
across.
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