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What is the best way to learn web development?

The general rule is to learn by doing as much as possible. Start by working through a brief tutorial that gives you the minimal amount of information you need to get started, and then always work on building things, looking things up and acquiring new skills as needed.

Specifically for web development:

1) Pick a development area you want to work with. PHP is an inferior language to Python or Ruby for a number of reasons, but is probably the fastest way to go from zero to a functioning website while still teaching you basic programming concepts that you can later on use to learn another language quickly.

2) The trickiest thing about learning web development isn't that any one thing is conceptually difficult, but that there are so many small things that you need to consider, often trying to piece together different tutorials about different tools. A book that works you through the basics of each part of the stack is helpful. This book is a good example: http://www.amazon.com/Learning-M...   Besides that book, you'll just need to know the basics of html (http://www.w3schools.com/ has very concise tutorials that you can work through), and the basics of setting up your web server - for any OS that you are running locally, there are packages that you can get to make it easy to set up and learn about webs servers and databases.

Don't worry about doing things the right way the first time - just get something up and running as soon as possible. Don't bother reading multiple other books or listening to a bunch of podcasts until you've built your first site.  Once you do, you'll have a much clearer idea of which of your skills you'd like to improve to build what you really are dreaming about, and can decide to learn new languages or frameworks as needed.  Given how technologies on the web are constantly changing, this latter learning process will probably never end!

Stay confident. Like anything you want to learn, it will take time. Try and tackle the easy things...the simple things. As you start to gain some little successes, your confidence will start to grow. One thing you will notice  are you start to learn, is that a lot of concepts are built on top of other ones. As you learn something new , try and see how it compares to previous things learned. Use one learning success to springboard into another.

Watch how others do it. Surf the web for ideas. See how others design their sites. You will start to see a lot of similar concepts and ideas used across sites.


This post first appeared on The Happy Developer, please read the originial post: here

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What is the best way to learn web development?

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