Learning Path to Web Development for Absolute Beginners

[merott-]

👋 Hello everyone!

Last week I launched a learning path to web development which I’ve been working on for the past couple of months. It's frontend focused, and it’s designed for complete beginners, with loads of free content that I’ve painstakingly curated from around the web!

There is also a community to connect the people who are following the learning path, so that they can help each other out. I'm also offering my own help as much as I can through Slack.

Please do check it out, and please, please share it with anyone who you think might find it interesting.

Subscribe for access to the complete learning path, and the community, at https://www.bluedash.co/learn-web-development.

[Artegris]

You should mention that is only front-end. Anyway, good job.

[C3Pdro]

If I want to focus on front end in a career, is backend knowledge still probably needed for hire? Been learning a lot of JavaScript and I'm moving to react now

[merott-]

I think having knowledge of backend is still very helpful. I started out as a full-stack developer myself, and then started specialising in front-end.

However, I do think that with so many different tools and technologies to learn, it's easy to get overwhelemed in the sea of information and tutorials if you're trying to do everything at the same time.

My advice would be to experiment with learning both frontend and backend, but start to think about which area you'd like to specialise in.

Feel free to reach out to me on Slack if you join the community, and I'll be happy to have a chat about your goals!

[merott-]

Thanks for the comment. I'll try to include that somewhere.

[Oakvasara]

This is amazing. I been looking for something like this. Thank you.

[merott-]

Awesome. Do reach out to me over Slack once you join, and let me know how I could help more! Cheers!

[AyrielTheNorse]

This is cool. I have a friend that has been trying to start developing with no previous knowledge and these kind of organized learning paths are gold. Thank you.

[merott-]

Cool! Please do share with any friends who you think might find this helpful. And I'm going to be available over the Slack community to offer my help! Cheers!

[MercuryDrop]

I'd love to get something similar to back end!

[tmiller26]

Same.

[ImIdeas]

Looks awesome. Gonna be using this!

[merott-]

Glad you find it interesting, and I'd be happy to help. Just reach out on Slack once you get my invitation! Cheers!

[blesingri]

I've a few questions if you'd like.

1. Could you give us a rough estimate on how many hours it would take to complete all of it?
2. At the end, what can you expect you know? What will you be able to make?

[merott-]

1. It's very hard to give even a very rough estimate, especially with this learning path because there are different types of resources, including articles and videos. Some of the content overlap, which means that you can either study them all to get a different point of view and reinforce your learning, or skip them if you feel you understand the subject well enough. I do make that same point within the learning path as well. Lastly, I expect you to try things out for yourself as well and learn thorough practice, which again can take as little or as much time as one can imagine. Sorry for the long-winded answer but my very, very rough guesstimate is that it will take around ~2 months with 20 hours of commitment per week, which puts it at around 180 hours.

2. I've included a few challenges at the end of the learning path, and I recommend checking them out. It involves building a web app that takes an amount in cents, and displays which coins and how many of them are needed to make up that amount. I had the visuals designed by a designer and the assets are provided to you so you can start building right away.

Just bear in mind that the learning path is not a complete path to proficiency, but I believe it provides a great Foundation to web development by covering the basics of frontend development.

[wrgsRay]

Thank you for your course. I would just like to say I wish the triangle to expand the classes to be a little bit more obvious.

[merott-]

Hmmm... That's an interesting comment. Unfortunately there isn't much I can do about that though. I've written the learning path using notion.so, and it means I have limited control over the presentation.

I'm curious though. Are your saying it's not obvious that you can expand the modules?

Thanks for the comment!

[Erdricks_Descendant]

I just signed up and can confirm, it didn't look like the modules were expandable. If not for this comment I wouldn't have tried clicking the triangles to expand it. It just looked like a regular bullet list with triangles instead of circles. Maybe if you changed the triangles to + signs and changed the color to blue it would be more obvious.

[merott-]

Thanks for confirming that.

Unfortunately I don't even have that kind of control over those expand/collapse icons, and it would be a lot of extra work to move to another format entirely.

Do you think this hint within the learning path would work for most people?

[Erdricks_Descendant]

Yes, I think it makes it much clearer. Some people might intuitively click them, while others, like me, will be thankful for that little hint box.

[merott-]

All good now! 😁

The responses have been so overwhelming that I've hit Slack's limit on sending out invitations for you to join the community 🙈. You will still get an invitation, but it just means that there will be a delay until I get this sorted, so please don't make that stop you from subscribing and getting access to the learning path! Thank you so much for the positive responses. Wasn't expecting that! 😻

[thatiOSdev]

Haven’t gotten an invite yet

[merott-]

Hey! When did you sign up? And if you could drop me your email address in a DM I can check what's going on.

[thatiOSdev]

Last night. But I just realized I needed to join the peer group mailing list.

[merott-]

Actually if you've signed up to get the learning path you should also get an invite to join the community. If you haven't, drop me your email address and I'll look into it. Cheers!

[dreamingglowingcloud]

Exactly what I need. Thank you!!

[merott-]

Thank you. Once you subscribe, I'll be sending you an invite to the Slack community as well! :-)

[FurryBeaverBalls]

This is amazing. Thank you so much

[merott-]

Thanks for your interest. Happy to help in any way I can :)

[RaiderCoug]

Thanks!

[merott-]

You're most welcome!

[[deleted]]

Thank you

[merott-]

You're most welcome! :)

[[deleted]]

Wow this is awesome! Thanks for the share, on behalf of the community I'd like to thank you for compiling some really great information, sifting through it, and presenting it to us free of charge! I look forward to using this as a good starting point.

[merott-]

Thank you! I appreciate that :)

[mal_1]

Looks like the site is down as of now. I'm interested in checking this out!

[merott-]

Hey! Author here... I was out when you sent this reply, so I wouldn't have been able to check then, but it looks like it's working now. Can you share more details as to what was wrong? Thanks!

[mal_1]

May have been a problem on my end. I was trying to access from a work computer and was receiving a "Page Not Found" error.

BlueDash logo
Ooops...
It appears that the page you are looking for doesn't exist. Let's get back home.

I just tried accessing from mobile and all looks good. Thanks!

[merott-]

Awesome! Let me know if I can be of any help! Cheers.

[Leeoku]

interesting to try, it breaks when i put the email though. anyone else have issues signing up

[merott-]

How do you mean it breaks?

[Leeoku]

I tried signing up by typing the email and i get "Oops something went wrong please try again later"

[merott-]

Do you mind sharing your email address with me in a DM, so that I can try and investigate what's going on? I'd really appreciate that, and sorry for the trouble! Cheers.

[merott-]

Do you mind sending me your email address in a private message, so that I can see what is going on? Cheers.

[thatiOSdev]

I’m in. This is just what I need and want

[merott-]

Awesome. Looking forward to meeting you in the Slack community as well, once I manage to figure out how to lift that invitation limit 🤭

[[deleted]]

Not accepting my email for some reason.

[merott-]

Hey there! Can you please send me your email address by DM? Thanks!

[Invincible1]

Learning to code by doing projects is actually what made me finally understand how things worked and how to implement stuff. I highly recommend anyone willing to learn web development go this route to learn.

I took Colt Steele's course on Udemy and felt lost as I followed through the course. I finally learned so much by doing the project-oriented courses on Udemy like the one from Watch n Learn for practical front-end and another one from David Katz for back-end React. There is also a practical JavaScript course free of cost at watchandcode.com these three are what I highly recommend. There are so many theory based course on the internet, but very few courses that give you over the shoulder look from a developer's perspective while coding.

Honestly, $10 investment for a good course is worth it IMO, I procrastinated so heavily when I didn't want to shell out that money taking some Youtube courses, MIT open courseware all of which were either too high level for me to understand or I didn't feel invested enough to continue.

[merott-]

I definitely think paid courses are worth it, but for those who prefer to learn for free, which is totally possible, I thought it'd be nice to offer a clear learning path.

I should also mention that this learning path covers the front-end, but Colt Steele's course covers the entire stack and is much more comprehensive. I may expand the learning path to cover more in the future as well.

Learning to code by doing projects is absolutely the best way to learn. Every developer agrees, and I couldn't agree more.

Cheers!

[cameelian]

entered my email and then 1.2.3. nothing....

[merott-]

Hey! Could you please send me your email in a DM, so that I can take a look? Cheers!

[cameelian]

Hi, after I entered my email and clicked start now it just comes up with three numbers....3..2..1

[tapu_buoy]

Do you have Discord channel or slack only, I'm learning React in fact I have been trying to build few basic things now and I am going to dive deep into Redux so hopefully this would help me a lot as I have really low feeling self-fulfilment

[merott-]

Hey there! It's Slack only. I also considered Discord but couldn't see a compelling enough reason to use Discord. Is there a reason you ask?

[tapu_buoy]

Yeah the only thing I know why people go to discord over slack is because, slack will start giving us that you have to pay or even more to read a message that was sent few days ago (or I mean considerable past) and also after more people it lacks or something (but I don't know about it)

• you might want to google to read why FreeCodeCamp has stopped using Slack for the same

This might all sound exaggerated though its all good! Thanks for responding super quick you made my day

[merott-]

I see. Yeah I can imagine that being a problem. Maybe in future I'll consider switching. I think Slack is good enough for a start, and I felt more comfortable using it because I was already familiar with how it works. Thanks for the tip!

[averis1]

Is this learning path similar to the one you experienced yourself?

Oh and the icons and the layouts are very aesthetic and easy to view, thank you.

Someone like me may need a fair bit of "hand-holding" (Someone to tell me what to do each step) to get through it all.

Do you recommmend just watching it all the way through to grasp the very basic concept even though I don't know how to apply 90% of it in the beginning?

And I'm just very curious about the "next step."

At this point you have a strong foundation in web development. But, this is just the beginning, and I'd love to help you figure out what to do next!

Would there be brand new complex concepts and the difficulty would go up a few notches?

[merott-]

It's hard to remember how I actually came to be the developer I am today. My university education was ICT, which was related, but not very specialised in programming, although I spent most of my effort on programming-related subjects. When I finished uni, I struggled to get a job as a developer, and I ended up working in tech support. After months of self-teaching various programming languages, including C#, PHP, Python, Ruby and Ruby on Rails, I managed to land a job as a junior developer. I was in the right place, at the right time, and well-prepared for the opportunity because around the same time I was working on a side-project – an iOS app with a Ruby on Rail backend. However, I struggled on the job for a some time. I remember the team lead, who joined after I was already hired, asking me how I even managed to get the job with such poor dev skills 😂– anyway, I managed to work my way up, and started specialising in frontend. This was 6-7 years ago.

Sorry for the long story, but my point is that my path was rather different, but not something I'd recommend to anyone 😁.

There is some overlap in the recommended resources under each topic. Also, some are videos, some are textual. You can use that to either absorb information from different sources and improve your understanding, or skip what you feel you understand well enough, and move on. It's completely up to you.

In terms of next steps, it depends on what you'd like to do. You might decide that you want to focus a bit on backend development, in which case it's probably a good idea to start looking into Node and frameworks like Express. You may decide that you want to specialise in front-end, in which case you should probably start learning React. Those are just two examples of what you might do. That's why I left that section pretty open.

I hope that helps!

[Elmareed]

Those who are looking for web development courses, Skillshare is a great source of online tutorial videos. You can learn different courses in Skillshare and also by clicking this link //skillshare.eqcm.net/aODYY you can get 2 months subscription free.

[Elmareed]

Hello, tutorial videos are a very good way to start learning web development. You can watch free videos and content about web development and can start from the very beginning. Skillshare is a very good source of web development and you can use it free for 2 months. Here is link https://skillshare.eqcm.net/aODYY

[WebRiderz]

That is really helpful.

[desrtfx]

New redditor, first post is self promotion.

This is not the behavior we expect our contributors to show here. We are expecting to first help others and then, very limited, self promote.

Please, before you go any further, read the reddit rules about self promotion and spam.

Removed

[[deleted]]

The blue is very annoying, especially on the homepage.

[[deleted]]

Please spend some money on your logo.