My Road Map To Learning Web Development

Jake Murray — Sat, 17 Aug 2019 09:51:35 +0000

Hello Dev, I'm Jake.

For my first post, I thought I would share with you my plan for learning web development. I have previously spent some time teaching myself, but it has been quite unorganized and I get distracted by "hot" technologies when they really shouldn't be on my radar yet. If you all have any comments or suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Phase 1: August - September

So the first phase of my self-education is only two months long. And will focus on 4 technologies.

HTML
CSS
Git/github
Command Line

I spent the first week going over HTML(mainly semantic) as a refresher. I’m familiar with HTML, so anything I don’t know I can easily look up as needed.

CSS is a bit different; I’m familiar with it, but only on a very basic level, so right now I am starting from the very beginning and putting about 2 months into really getting a solid knowledge base that can get me working. Some might think that’s overkill, but it gives me time to both learn and experiment a substantial amount. I’m not planning on mastering it, of course, but if I can get to a point where I can do most of what I need for the rest of my learning plan, then I’ll be happy for the time being.

Now with the command line and git/github, I plan on learning the basics so I can get up and going. I don’t plan on spending a substantial amount of time studying these. I’ll learn as I go.

Here are the resources I am currently using for phase 1.

For CSS:

Advanced CSS and Sass - Udemy course by Jonas Schmedtmann
CSS Tricks
CSS: The Definitive Guide (I only link Amazon because O’Reilly does so on their site.)
A few YouTube channels such as The Net Ninja and Traversy Media

For Git/Github:
The Odin Project has a pretty good intro course to github that I enjoyed.

Command Line:
Wes Bos has a Command Line Power User course that I will be taking. I haven’t yet, but he does fantastic work so I have no qualms about blindly recommending his course.

Phase 2: October - March

Phase 2 is going to be pretty much all Javascript related, but here are the technologies I hope to touch on during this phase.

Javascript
React
JSON
Gatsby and Netlify (Where I plan on hosting my website when it is launched.)

PROJECTS, PROJECTS, PROJECTS

I have a few options when it comes to JS; there are a few Udemy courses I am interested in that I will choose from when the time comes. I also purchased a copy of Eloquent Javascript for reference and I plan on reading through the You Don't Know JS books as well.

Most importantly, however, and this is the reason for a 6 month long phase, I will be making things. I have a list of projects I would like to build, and I plan on working through it throughout phase 2. I really don't have much more to say about phase 2, but if there is enough interest I will post an update once I get into it.

Phase 3: April - May

Phase 3 will be my wildcard phase. If there is anything left that I didn't accomplish during phase 2, this will be a buffer period to do so. I also plan on building and launching my own website during this time, and applying for jobs. If all of this goes smoothly, I will begin learning backend technologies as well, but as of right now, this isn't a huge priority.