Are you considering becoming a web developer but you have no ideea where to start? Fear not, because all experienced web devs have been there at some point. It may be easy for some to get access to the right information, but if you have no developer friends or you’ve graduated from a form of education that doesn’t cover software development it may be hard for you to start.
Sure, many of us have heard the classic “Start with HTML, then CSS, then Javascript”. But is that really what you need to do? My biggest frustration with web development was that when I started there where so many frameworks and so many different things you could learn to cover one small part of web development, and you had no ideea what was one and what was the other, and you really didn’t know which was the one you wanted to learn, cause it would take forever to learn all of them just to choose one and dismiss the others. So Ifigured out that to better understand web development you need to take a look at the bigger picture. So at that time I gathered as much information as I could and I came up with the absolute beginner’s guide to web development in one picture.
Now, this is far from perfect, and it does not cover everything but it’s a great head start. Intentionatly I won’t tell you what any of the colors mean. You may look at it and tell yourself that it doesn’t help you at all because there are no explanations, but here is the fun part. All you have to do is to google (or whichever search engine you prefer) each and every keyword you see in this picture to get a better understanding of web development as a whole. Some of the things shown above are programming languages, some are frameworks, some are concepts, etc. take a step in the right direction and search the web for each one of theese. find out what is a framework, what is a programming language, etc. Even with zero knowledge about development or programming, you shoud first try and see the bigger picture rather than diving right in and getting lost in the process.
Once you get an ideea of web development as a whole, you need to decide yourself which little piece of this domain you want to specialise yourself in. If you’re not sure you can try a little bit of everything and do what fits you best! The thing is, it is not mandatory to start with HTML and then CSS and so on as many claim, you can make SQL databases or PHP backends without knowing much about the others, and still consider yourself a web developer.
After you decide what you want to do you’ll need hands-on experience. There are many great places on the internet full of free resources where you can learn web development, or any type of development you wish. I’ll write an article in the future about all of them so stay tuned! Till then i’ll give you a small hint, you may want to start by searching the web for W3Schools and use their free learning resources as a starting point.
Don’t be afraid to expore by youself, and dare to learn from unconventional methods.
Stay determined!