Although everyone will go about it differently, this is how I am learning web development.
Outline:
- Use of internet course material.
- Support online material with printed books.
- Attending local meetup groups.
This is what works for me and I would like to describe for you the material I have chosen, and how I use it to go about learning front end development.
Use of online course material.
In the beginning when I decided to focus on front end web development I did google searches on job listings for developers. That's where I began to look at the qualifications for candidates to see what I needed to learn. Honestly I had no clue as to what html was, I didn't know the difference between javascript and java, or what CSS was for. In fact I couldn't type more than ten words a minute and that was with my eyes glued to the keyboard.
The first place that I began to learn development was Youtube. I started by looking up things like ' What is html', and ' What is javascript? '. From those early beginnings I saw people coding in real time and I was immediately impressed by their command of the keyboard. So I went over to typing.com ( Link ) and enrolled in the free courses to get some keyboarding skills under my belt. I spent about two months doing daily drills until I was at a comfortable 30 words a minute with 95% accuracy.
During that time I was reading everything that I could find through Google about how to learn development through non-traditional sources. I searched ' What is the best online web development school?'. That's where I found out about codecademy ( Link ) and I jumped right in. This is where I did my first bit of coding in html. I coded a basic page with a "Hello World" and if you are reading this and don't know what that is, well you are not alone, neither did I until I did it. The reason that I went with codecademy was because it was free, but I wanted to get the best return for the investment of my time, and continued research kept pointing to courses that you had to pay for. Finally I chose to join Treehouse, mainly because of the reviews but also because of the price.
As the months have passed I can tell you that I am pleased with my decision to join Team Treehouse, The material is well presented and easy to digest, and the courses are laid out in tracts that build on top of each other. In a relatively short period of time I covered material that it could have easily taken years to learn on my own.
Use of printed material:
It didn't take very many Google searches to find the work of Jon Duckett. Once I decided to purchase his book 'HTML & CSS design and build websites' I went to ebay and picked it up with shipping for less than twenty bucks. The book came and I started reading it right away, immediately I found the layout of the sections easy to follow and the way that MR. Duckett explains things makes you feel at ease as though you are sitting right there in a classroom. My first day with the book I sat in a McDonald's with my used lenovo T420 and downloaded the project files over the free wi-fi. I started working with the files right there over my big-mac.
Probably the very first thing that I noticed was that the Treehouse course that I had been working on at home, seemed as though it had used the Duckett book as a template. This has happened many times since and often when I get stuck in a Treehouse module, I'll spend some time reading Duckett and find the answer in the text. In college I relied heavily on the textbooks for things like Photoshop and Maya where the complexity of tasks could be overwhelming and I would need another angle to approach the problem from.
Bottom line is, if the textbook route works for you, then I recomend these two books:
- HTML & CSS design and build websites. By Jon Duckett
- JAVASCTIPT & JQUERY interactive front-end web development. By Jon Duckett
This is where I am at now. I have looked up and joined a couple of groups, I showed up downtown for a meetup but I was a few minutes late and the building was secured so I couldn't get in. My hope is to make it to my first meeting and update this blog with how it went. Until then, happy coding.
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