Who is a front-end developer?
The role of a front-end developer is to guarantee that website users may readily interact with the page. Nowadays a lot of what used to be done by “pure” back-end developers are being done by front-end developers. They get to work on many different aspects of the products: design, performance, code, colors, typography, UX, and other tools.
How to start step by step
1. Computer Science
First, you have to get a knowledge of the basics of Computer Science, don’t spend a lot of time on that, just try to understand how a computer works.
The best resource is the FREE CS course offered by Harvard called CS50. https://pll.harvard.edu/course/cs50-introduction-computer-science?delta=0
It’s well known and simply the best.
2. HTML & CSS
Learning the basic languages of the web is necessary to pursue a front-end career. HTML is easy and won’t take you a lot of time, just a couple of hours. On the other hand, CSS is easy to start hard to master. I’ve seen people recommending spending around 80-100 hours on CSS before moving forward. Just keep building the most common things on websites like navbar etc.
There are a lot of free resources on that, there are numerous youtube tutorials, but one of the best is the “Responsive Web Design” course by freecodecamp.com. Great platform, everything is free, and you can get a certificate after.
3. JavaScript
JavaScript is one the most popular programming language and when you want to become a front-end/web developer proficiency in this is a must! Its role (compared to providing content and value to a page as in HTML&CSS) is to make a page interactive. You need to learn the basics of the languages such as variables, arrays, objects, loops, functions, etc. Of course, if you have prior programming experience in other languages it will be much easier. When I started learning JS a couple of months ago I already had had prior experience in Python so it made my learning much more pleasant.
Here is MDN first steps in the JavaScript guide: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/JavaScript/First_steps
Freecodecamp.com also has a JS course. https://www.freecodecamp.org/learn/javascript-algorithms-and-data-structures/
You’ve mastered JavaScript – What’s next?
There are a lot of frameworks and depending on which company you want to work for, what do you specifically want to do the choice may differ. The most popular are React, Angular, Vue.js.
Great tutorial. As a person who learned the basics of web development some time ago I agree with most of you just said. Although I’d like to add something more. While learning HTML it’s very important to learn semantics of the language and use them with purpose. Every HTML tag has its meaning behind it and when SEO plays a big part in internet you have to bear in mind that your websites are mostly scanned by robots, and not looked at by humans. So I’d focus on SEO and semantics here. When you master the basics of CSS I’d recommend discovering SCSS or LESS preprocessor languages because they’ll save you a ton of time in the future. At that point you’d be ready to start learning Javascript. Believe me, an ability to create UIs in a matter of seconds will come in handy while learning ReactJS for instance. For beginners I’d recommend focus on the HTML and CSS and master them thoroughly while learning basics of JS. Having mastered advanced HTML & CSS and basics of JS I’d jump into JS frameworks.