Where to start when you are new to Web Development

5 min readNov 25, 2019

When you start your journey as a web developer, there is a pretty good chance that you might be overwhelmed with the number of technologies that are added every day.

You’ll soon find yourself in the ocean of technologies that are trending right now or are predicted to be trending soon. Either of the options would be a bad decision for you if not chosen wisely.

Making the right decision

If you’re considering to learn web development because it is an on-demand skill that every company is looking for, then I assume that you want to make money by offering one of the most valued skills. Web development is increasing in demand with a growth rate of 13% over 10 years.

1. Your location matters

Remember that your end goal is to get a job and to fulfil that, you need to offer what the market wants. There are lots of technology, the one you have to choose is what companies in your locality demands.

For example: If the companies in your location demand NodeJS developers there is no point in learning PHP and applying for a job. You’re setting up yourself for disappointment

I’m not against any tech stack, every technology is great in their unique ways. But I suggest that you learn the tech stack that is the most demanded in your locality so that you can leverage your skills and get a job. After getting a job you can always learn other tech stacks and expand your skillset. Most importantly you can have multiple skills under your belt which makes you even more valuable in the industry.

I cannot stress it more, the demand for technology in your locality has to be fulfilled before you go learn your favourite technology. Always remember to supply what the market demands for

2. Practise what you learn

After choosing the right tech stack for yourself start looking for great tutorials, community, experts, etc around your tech stack. A great way to learn new technologies is to go through the official documentation provided by experts.

Just watching the tutorials or reading articles/blogs won’t benefit you at all. To be good at coding you need to build things with what you learnt, it is that moment when you encounter errors/bugs in your code. Experience in coding comes by solving those errors/bugs which makes you more proficient. Building projects are important, you will learn a lot of new ways to implement a solution, also you’ll learn many related concepts required to complete the project

Pillars of web development

Every web developer must know the core languages of the web such as HTML, CSS and Vanilla JavaScript. There are lots of frameworks/libraries to ease the development process but these tools are for established developers who know what they’re doing.

When you are starting in this field I suggest that you learn the basics first. It helps you understand how things work under the hood. Learn plain HTML and CSS without using any preprocessors and learn Vanilla JavaScript before jumping to any frameworks out there.

HTML ( HyperText Markup Language )

HTML is the backbone of the web, it describes the structure of the web page. HTML elements tell the browser how to display the content. Once you learn all the main tags and its application then you can proceed to learn CSS. You don’t need to learn every single thing available on the internet. A simple HTML document would look like this.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <title>Simple HTML document</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>My First Heading</h1>
        <p>My first paragraph.</p>
    </body>
</html>

You can learn more tags and how to implement every one of them on the Mozilla Developer site for HTML

CSS ( Cascading Style Sheets )

Cascading style sheets are used to format the layout of Web pages. They can be used to define text styles, table sizes, and other aspects of Web pages that previously could only be defined in a page’s HTML.

CSS helps Web developers create a uniform look across several pages of a Web site. Instead of defining the style of each table and each block of text within a page’s HTML, commonly used styles need to be defined only once in a CSS document. Once the style is defined in the cascading style sheet, it can be used by any page that references the CSS file.

You can refer CSS properties and implementation on the Mozilla Developer site for CSS

Vanilla JavaScript

Javascript (JS) is a scripting language, primarily used on the Web. It is used to enhance HTML pages and is commonly found embedded in HTML code. JavaScript is an interpreted language. Thus, it doesn’t need to be compiled. JavaScript renders web pages interactively and dynamically.

JavaScript adds life to the web page by making it interactive and more user-friendly. You can use JS for multiple tasks such as interactive menus, listening for events, etc.

Some great books to get started with JS are:

Eloquent JavaScript
You Don’t Know JS: Up & Going

You can learn more and refer Javascript on the Mozilla Developer site for JS

Developers to follow for tutorials

Dev Ed — Beginner to Intermediate
Traversy Media — Intermediate and Crash courses
The Net Ninja — Amazing content and organized playlists
Programming with Mosh — For short insightful crash courses