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Ask HN: Online resources for beginner web dev/design

8 points by antoko ↗ HN
My stepson (19, no college) is going to explore web development and design. He doesn't have any prior experience. I'm looking for free online resources for him to get some exposure. I was thinking html,css,jQuery on codecademy to start with, and then introducing JavaScript. What else is out there? Is there anything similar for the design side of things?

13 comments

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AJAr
You can check out Treehouse. It's not free, but a great value for the money since you get access to their full library.

http://teamtreehouse.com/tracks

antoko
Thanks, this looks good, and it is close enough to free, I was just trying to avoid 12 week immersion code schools for $1000s. That may be an option later but just testing the waters first.
joshschreuder
CodeSchool (http://codeschool.com/) is another similar one to Team Treehouse.

Their HTML / CSS ones are paid, but they have a free Javascript intro one: https://www.codeschool.com/courses/javascript-road-trip-part...

antoko
Thanks, this looks pretty similar to codecademy, have you done the courses? Any reason in particular to choose this over codecademy? I guess he can try the free ones and see if he finds additional value.
joshschreuder
I have done a number of the CodeSchool ones, they are a video tutorial followed by an interactive code editor thing like Codecademy.

The difference is that Codecademy doesn't have the video beforehand (you read the instructions and do the exercise), vs. CodeSchool which gives a bit more of an in-depth explanation then you do the exercise.

I guess it comes down to which method of learning your stepson prefers.

lollipop25
A good place for documentation is MDN (Mozilla Developer Network) https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web. They have extensive documentation with regards to web technologies. I suggest he read up about HTML first, getting the first few basic elements on the page. Then he can move on to CSS to style up the page.

At this point, you can practically build basic webpages with just HTML and CSS. From here, you can take 2 paths: A graphics designer or a front-end developer.

A graphics designer leans more to design rather than building apps. This requires a basic of jQuery, but mastery of Photoshop. A good place to learn is reading articles from Smashing Magazine http://www.smashingmagazine.com/

A front-end developer leans more to app-building rather than design. This requires knowledge of JavaScript libraries and best practices. For this, select your basic set of frameworks and master them. Suggestions range from jQuery, Bootstrap, to full-fledged frameworks like Ember and Angular.

antoko
Thanks for the smashing magazine link, should be worth exploring. While the MDN resources are great I was looking for more interactive tutorials. I'm hoping the gameification format used by codecademy will pull him in. Experince tells me his enthusiasm is inversely proportional to my own, so I'm hoping he can catch the bug without me having to walk through it with him.
lollipop25
You can provide him an IDE setup to give the errors. Sublime Text can be set up with plugins that provide immediate feedback about code errors. Just select a few for HTML, for CSS and for JS.

As for the gamification, https://codecombat.com/

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tmuir
I really like www.w3schools.com They go through HTML, CSS, JS, JQuery, and a ton of other stuff. I'm sure they're not the only site that does this, but I found the "Try it Yourself" feature to be extremely helpful. Every single concept has an built in editor with example code/markup, so you can see it in action, change it, break it, whatever.