Learning Web Dev Series – Part 1: Starting Point

I want to learn Web Development. And I want to share my journey from beginner to wherever I am going to go with this (hopefully an expert with time). That is the premise for this series of blog posts.

I am starting this series off with a little information about my starting point and where I am heading off first.

My Background

Back in 2007, for a school project, I made a rather big web site. It was a social news site about technology. It had news, articles, commenting, and a huge mess of a custom, built-from-scratch forum. It was made with HTML, CSS and some JavaScript on the frontend, and PHP and MySQL on the backend.

It worked, but it was also my first real programming project. It was slow as hell and there was a lot of duplicated code. I tried cleaning up once. Once.

I have therefore done some HTML and CSS, but it was XHTML and probably CSS 1. And I wasn’t that good. I have done some JavaScript, but only really basic stuff like form validation. I am not going to use PHP again (and probably not MySQL either).

With this in mind, I am thinking of myself as starting from scratch. I have never used a proper JavaScript Framework, but I know the basics of the web. I want to go into this with as fresh as mind as possible and relearn everything I “know”.

My Angle – Back to Basics

Even though I haven’t really done Web Development in many years, I have picked up some things about the current ways of things. I have heard lots about Javascript Frameworks, backend and many cool projects floating around the Open Source scene.

However, I am going to start with the basics first. I want to start as a real beginner. I don’t want old knowledge get in the way of learning how things are done now. I am sure they are quite different! I am going to learn HTML and CSS first.

I want to be able to make some static web pages that looks OK. Later, I’ll assess all the possibilities in frameworks, backend solutions and all that stuff. I haven’t really decided all the steps yet, but I know where I am going to start.

I have some courses on Udemy.com that I picked up really cheap a little while a go that I am going to try. My first step is going to do a course called “Learn To Build Beautiful HTML5 And CSS3 Websites In 1 Month”. It’s seems to capture my intent pretty well. I don’t know if it's any good, but I’ll try it out and let you know what I learn.