Welcome to Beginner's Web Development

Congratulations on tak­ing the very first steps on your jour­ney to be­com­ing a web de­vel­oper, and wel­come to our course to help you kick­start your learn­ing. We are thrilled to have you here, and we can­not wait to help you dis­cover a whole new skill set that will en­able you to start build­ing in­cred­i­ble web­sites.

This course is de­signed to guide you through the fun­da­men­tals of web de­vel­op­ment, with chap­ters fo­cus­ing on HTML, CSS, and be­gin­ner's JavaScript. Throughout each chap­ter, you will gain the fun­da­men­tal knowl­edge and skills to get you up and run­ning in your web de­vel­op­ment jour­ney.

On this jour­ney, you'll gain a foun­da­tional un­der­stand­ing not only of how to start work­ing on your own pro­jects, but also the ba­sics of how every web­site you in­ter­act with func­tions be­hind the scenes.

Things to keep in mind during this course

Learning to code is a re­ward­ing ex­pe­ri­ence, and one that any­one can do. However, it does take time. Gaining a new skill is a jour­ney, not a des­ti­na­tion. Instead of think­ing about the con­tent in this course, or any ma­te­r­ial you read, as some­thing to read through and learn, think of it in­stead as jump­ing off points for you to ex­plore on your own.

Coding is a fun­da­men­tally easy thing to cut cor­ners on. There are very few prob­lems that some­one else hasn't solved be­fore. But truly, we aren't try­ing only to build things while we're learn­ing pro­gram­ming. We're try­ing to learn how to build. So rather than look­ing up an­swers, copy­ing code and see­ing it work, it's bet­ter to take your time and fo­cus on what each con­cept we show you is re­ally about.

How you should tackle this course

First, it's bet­ter to do this course in smaller chunks over more time, rather than in big chunks in a shorter time­frame. A lot of the time, learn­ing pro­gram­ming is some­thing that's more men­tally tax­ing than peo­ple re­al­ize. If some­thing is not mak­ing sense to you af­ter con­sid­er­able ef­fort, its of­ten bet­ter to leave the prob­lem be for a day or two, let your mind cool off, and come back to it later. You'll of­ten be sur­prised how many prob­lems seem­ingly solve them­selves this way.

While work­ing on this course's con­tent, we also rec­om­mend us­ing a com­puter, rather than a phone. Writing code isn't re­ally com­mon on phones or tablets, and it's best to get used to go­ing back and forth be­tween read­ing about cod­ing, and then do­ing it a bit. This very easy on a com­puter.

Lastly, we strongly rec­om­mend that you try and re­main as fo­cused as pos­si­ble while work­ing on cod­ing at first. This means try­ing to find time, even if its just a few min­utes, where you can have cod­ing be the only thing you're try­ing to do. Having other con­tent on in the back­ground can also be more dis­tract­ing than you might think. Each per­son is dif­fer­ent, and you might think that you are good at multi-task­ing. But re­ally, if you haven't writ­ten much code be­fore, the truth is you don't know how well you'll do while hav­ing your fo­cus even slightly split. At least at first, we rec­om­mend a quiet en­vi­ron­ment to help.

Even while writ­ing code for a liv­ing, many of us talk about how when fo­cus­ing on hard prob­lems, we turn our mu­sic and pod­casts off!

First Thing's First

Before we get started, though, there are a few setup items we should walk through. First, we'll need to set up your “local en­vi­ron­ment”.