Modern Guide to Web Development

Internet a word that doesn’t need an introduction. The second virtual thing that can make the world run well the first will always be money. Us humans are so addicted to it that we cannot live without it anymore. Roughly there are 1 billion websites according to recent studies. Now what drives the internet is the need to exchange the information without it we are no better than our ancestors who used to live in a cave. So, with this increase in the number of websites in daily life for promoting business, education, health and many more industries there is a promising need for web developers. The need to handle the requirements of more than 7 billion people in the world is a herculean task and web developers can make it simple.Web development is not just about building websites that serve the purpose anymore there are a lot of things to consider while developing them. The user experience matters a lot. So lets design websites that are fluently designed and take your skills to the next level.

So, what do web developers do? U guessed it right they design websites. So, the next question that’ll be raised in one’s mind is how I should become a web developer. Trust me it’s easy. There are numerous online resources that can help you to start learning the basics.  To become a good web developer, you just need months but to become a great web developer you need years of practice and the curiosity to learn should never cease. If I start telling the technologies that you need to learn to become a web developer, I bet that you’ll be overwhelmed but I intend to make it simple by suggesting the right track to follow. So, stay tuned for the upcoming posts on how to start making websites with ease. I’ll make it as easy as possible and I’m sure that you are going to love it.

There are three tracks to follow to become a web developer and it’s your choice to choose which track to follow. One of them is a Front-End Web Development other is Back-End Web Development next comes the mighty Full Stack Web Development.  In case you are wondering what these are don’t worry you’ll catch up.

Let’s begin with Front-End Web development. So, what does it exactly mean? Let’s divide a website into two parts in which the first one is the user interface meaning the part which you see on your browser when you visit a website. The second part is the Back End i.e. the background data flow from your website to the server and to a persistent data storage. For now, let’s just discuss the Front End. HTML & CSS are a must for a beginner to start developing websites. Anyone can create static (websites without any functionality) websites using these. Some online resources are freecodecamp, W3schools, codecademy and many more free tutorials where even an absolute beginner can start with.

After completing with HTML, CSS I’d prefer learning JavaScript. So why should you learn JavaScript? JavaScript lets you add functionality to your website let me give you an idea of things you can do with JavaScript. Validating forms, user authentication, animations and many more functionalities on the client side (on your browser). You can even send user data to the server and store it on a persistent data storage. So, what does this tell you?, It means you can do both Front End and Back End development using JavaScript. The JavaScript also has many useful libraries like jQuery and AJAX to improve user experience on the Front End. Another famous front-end library is Bootstrap which uses HTML and CSS based templates to design your websites and web applications. Bootstrap is easy to use and provides a great design. After mastering all these libraries and languages you can call yourself a Front-End Web Developer. Yeah, give yourself a pat on the back.

Now let’s discuss the Back-End Web development. What does the Back-End actually deal with?. It lets you create a server that listens to the user’s request of visiting a web page. We also need to develop REST APIs for different pages on your website. We also need to learn about web requests and how to send data to the server using web requests. Now once we get the data we need to process the web request and get the useful data from it and do necessary functionality using the data. The data can also be used to store on to a database like MySQL, SQLite, MongoDB etc.

Wow, now it seems like a lot of work to do on the Back-End. Don’t let that intimidate you I can tell you a trick to do all the above-mentioned tasks using a single language i.e. JavaScript. Yeah, One language for all doesn’t that sound easy now. Now to use JavaScript in the Back-End you need to use Node.js yeah just another JavaScript runtime environment for executing on the server side i.e. Back-End. In order to make web developers task easy MongoDB, a No-SQL document-oriented database program also uses JavaScript. Now should I remind you again how important it is to learn javascript?. Yeah after learning all these you are a Back-End developer too.

Full Stack developer is someone who develops both the client and server side i.e. both Front-End and Back-End. Yeah, you are the mighty Full Stack Web Developer if you can just code for both Front-End and Back-End.

Now there are frameworks that people use to design the web apps. There are two prominent frameworks AngularJS and ReactJS. AngularJS is a JavaScript-based open-source front-end framework. It is maintained by Google. AngularJS is mainly used to develop single page web apps and doesn’t support SEO. AngularJS uses TypeScript which users need to learn to develop. TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript. React is also another highly used JavaScript framework for front-end web apps developed and maintained by Facebook. Now the question is should you learn these two to develop websites?. The answer may be no for now but the future is for web apps and maybe you can start spending time with these now than later. Django is another framework which uses python to develop web apps and is gaining in popularity.

So in order make your tasks a bit easy I’ll suggest some web development tools that are a must these days to use. The first is Git. Yeah, the version control is really helpful for managing your project across teams. I prefer using Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code as IDE for web development because it has built-in functionalities for many languages and is amazingly fast. Use NPM to import packages in Node environment. Yeah with all these suggestions you should be ready to kick-start your journey to become an amazing web developer. Remember that patience is the key to success and hard work always pays off.