If you want to become a web developer, you must know what you should learn now so that employers want to hire you in upcoming years. You might be curious about questions like- What it’s like to be a web developer? What do you need to know? What technologies do I need to learn to become expert in web development?
I don’t why web developers not like to share all this information with beginners. In this post I am going to tell you what you need to learn, in which order you need to learn and from where you need to learn.
There are lot of web development companies which are hiring web developers and at very handsome salary. You just need to learn the right stuff and in right way. There are many web technologies and development frameworks, but you do not need to learn all of them. I am going to tell you what you should learn to become a professional web developer. Keep reading this as I am going to shortcut your way to learn web development. I am going to divide the web development into three stages or put simply, into three different categories.
· Basic Front End Development
· Front End web Development
· Backend Web development
Basic Front End Web Development:
No matter which path you choose and which technology you opt, there is a basic front end web development part that you must need to know. This includes the following technologies:
– HTML(HTML5)
– CSS
– JavaScript
This is your first step as web developer. Get comfortable with basics of these three because no matter which platform, you choose you have to deal with these three. These three are used to build front end (User Interface) in every platform like windows, mobile web development, Android development, iOS development and so on. Every web development department running these three technologies in browser. Learn HTML5 as it is much better and powerful than previous versions of HTML. Next, try to get comfortable with CSS. You don’t need to be a super ninja CSS developer. Just know its basics and learn how it is used to style HTML elements. There is lot to learn in JavaScript and DOM scripting. First, try to learn basic things in javascript like client side validations and how javascript talk to a web server. Then, learn more advanced technologies like AJAX and jQuery and how to make AJAX calls to server. If you learn all this stuff, you are done with Basic front end part and ready to move to next phase.
Next, you need to choose your destination. You can choose either front end web development or backend web development. Employers hire people who know front end development or who know backend development or people who know both. But I Suggest you to go with one of these. Front end development is more related to application’s user view and how user interact with application while back end development is all about dealing with servers and databases.You can easily get job if you learn any one of these. Next, I am going to tell you which technologies you should learn in each of these. But before jumping to real web development, you need to know few other things. These include:
– Basic Terminal Usage/ Command Line
– Github
– FTP
– Basics of Web services/API’s
– Client-Server architecture
– How Internet Works
Many people avoid to use command line. They are afraid of it because they do not know the basic set of commands. Once you practiced basic commands, using command terminal is not much difficult. If you are interesting in Ruby on Rails, you have to launch many Ruby commands through the terminal. Next, you need to know about Github. Don’t panic if you haven’t listen this word before, it is just online repository for version control system. Just google it and learn more about it. You surely heard about FTP. You need to know about FTP as it is the most common way to upload your project files to the hosting server. Next thing you want to learn is Web services(also called API’s). You do not need how to write a web service, just get familiar with them and understand how they work. I know it’s getting too much but the last thing you need to learn before starting with real web development is working of Client Server architecture. Learn how browser(front end) send requests to server(back end) and how server respond to them. When you have idea about all these, you can move to either front end development or backend development for which the web development companies are actually hiring people.
Are you confused which way you want to go? Gone are those days when front end means simple static HTML and CSS. Things have changed a lot and front end is now more interactive and more functional. On the other hand if you are curious about server management, database management,etc, you should go for back end development.
Front end Web development :
Let’s say you decided to go with front end web development. You first need to learn one of the MVC Javascript frameworks. There are plenty of them, but you need only to master one of them.
Few of them are:
– Knockout.js
– Backbone.js
– Angular.js
If you want me to get straight to the point, learn Angular.js .There are lot and lot angular.js jobs. People hire both backbone and angular Developers but angular is going to dominate the web development industry in next few years. These are very powerful javascript frameworks as you can developed single page web applications(like Google Gmail) with these.
One thing I want to mention specifically here is Responsive web design. A responsive web design is one which adjust itself according to the dimensions of viewing screen. It is not much difficult to understand and you can learn building responsive web designs in just couple of weeks. Working in JavasSript frameworks involves hundreds of code files and in order to manage them you need to learn few tools. I suggest you to get comfortable either with Grunt or Gulp. These both runs on command line and that’s why, in the beginning, I emphasis learning command line.
So, that is the stuff what employers are looking in front end developers. I know it is lot but things will getting easy as you learn and move ahead step by step.
Back End Development:
Now talk a little bit about back end web development. Choosing this means you want to be server guy who loves to works with databases. Generally, a backend server is running one of these languages:
– Ruby on Rails
– Node.js(javascript)
– PHP
– Python/Django
– .NET (c#)
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If you are talking about number of jobs, there are tons of Ruby on Rails jobs out there. There are lot of PHP jobs but PHP developers get paid little less as compared to others. If you are very good in JavaScript, then choose Node.js. ASP.NET MVC is also good option. It will be good to get comfortable in more than one of these technologies but one will also work fine. You also need to learn about databases like Mysql, MangoDB, etc.
Well, there are lot of other advanced things to learn in web development like Dev Ops and server management. But the stuff I discussed so for is more than enough to get a good paying web development job. These are the technologies people are using now and these are not going anywhere in upcoming years.
Where to learn Web development
Now you know which technologies you need to learn, but it is more important to know from which resources you need learn. You don’t need to attend web development classes at some university. I learnt and currently learning web development by taking online web development program at Treehouse. Of course, you must know the basics of web development before start learning. Currently they are offering huge discounts on their all plans.
Get 3 Months Off of Our Pro Annual Plan ($147 Value) For A Limited Time at Treehouse. Sign up now!
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These guys are too good and provide awesome online web development courses. The good thing about Treehouse is they teach you up to date stuff. You can also try Treehouse free for First 14 days and then if you like it, you can choose your plan. In order to try Treehouse for free, sign up using the below link.
14-Day FREE Trial - Learn Web Design, Coding & much more with No Contract for a limited time at Treehouse - START NOW!
They are charging very fair amount for providing such valuable online web development courses. There are many other web design and development courses available online, but I highly recommend you to go with Treehouse.
Happy learning. I wish you all the best.
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Thank you, helped me a lot to decide.
Got to work hard from now.
Thank you very much for the detailed explanation. helped me to decide from where to start 🙂