Ask HN: How to self learn Web Development?

3 points by dustinty ↗ HN
Please suggest books, videos, MOOC, tutorials

5 comments

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"Web Development 101" (free online course, create account only to track your progress) https://www.theodinproject.com/courses/web-development-101

"If you are a complete beginner, web development can be challenging — we will hold your hand and provide enough detail for you to feel comfortable and learn the topics properly." https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn

"Want to learn web development but don’t know where to start?" https://medium.freecodecamp.org/want-to-learn-web-developmen... ... which points to the free https://www.freecodecamp.org/

To be honest those are on first Google search result page when searching "learn web development". They're all high quality.

Any recommendations for an outline and/or more substantial comparing&contrasting of popular back-end frameworks?
I highly recommend Udemy courses like this one https://www.udemy.com/the-web-developer-bootcamp/

It's by far the best in terms of price compared to other websites it explains enough for you to go out and build stuff on your own. If you need to go more advanced he has an advanced course, it's how I learned how to code

So, I think my answer is a little different but: first decide what you mean by Web Development.

These days it isn't really one thing, but an ecosystem of technologies.

Secondly, inventory what you already know -- and tell us.

Now one has a basis for recommendations.

To put it another way, if I think you are a beginner who knows nothing, I might recommend the most "mainstream" system. So a nodeJS backend and react front end, or whatever TIOBE tells me is dominant right now.

I would recommend this even if I don't use it, trusting the crowd to be wiser than I am.

However, if you told me you have been studying python for 10 years (or however old python is), and you love it and have it all set up, I might recommend Django or something.

Once you know what you are learning, there are many (many, many) courses on almost anything you want to learn.

Even there I would trust to the wisdom of the crowds. The most highly rated book on Django on Amazon is probably more relevant to what you would do, probably contains better practices, and is probably won't break compared to what I happen to have on my shelf that I have read.

Once I do all that, I look at: Udacity, Coursera and EdX to see if they have the subject I want, and I audit the course. (And in that order). The Udacity web development courses were, for me, a revelation.

Finally, have a project in mind and use git.

> Secondly, inventory what you already know -- and tell us.

I had a look at the user's previous question. 60 days ago the same question "Best way to get started with web programming for non-programmers?" so I figured answering with beginner resources on HTML/CSS/frontend Javascript. At that stage any structured course + dedication to work through it helps.