How to get started with Web Development?

The topic of web development has evolved quiet a lot in the last 7–8 years. Earlier web development was limited to just HTML,CSS and basic Javascript. But this is not the thing now. With the evolution and development of javascript more and more libraries and frameworks of javascript are being introduced everyday.

For a person to get a job as a web developer there are many things that one need to know. Lets divide this whole thing into Front-End and Back-End. Let’s get started with the Front-End part.

Front-End Web Development

So before going to stuffs that one need to know as a front end developer let’s see what does a front end developer does. In simple words front end is the part of the website that you are able to visualise. For example , now you are viewing medium.com so the interface which you are able to see is the front end of the website. So a front developer simply develops the front end of a website. Now coming to what a front-end developer needs to know.

As a front end developer one should obviously be familiar with HTML as it is the skeleton of a website, next comes CSS as it helps to design your site,add colours and animations.As most you know that CSS is not a programming language and as a result you cannot do things like declaring variables and other things, so here come SASS . So SASS is basically a kind of preprocessor scripting language which later on will get compiled into original CSS code.

Now comes JavaScript, it is the first programming language for web development and is extremely powerful. Java Script can be used to make your site more interactive. JavaScript can be used to manipulate the HTML which is known as DOM manipulation. JavaScript is not famous because of this reason only. It is famous because of the beautiful libraries and frameworks and because of the huge community support. There are various front-end JavaScript libraries and frameworks. The famous of all of them are :

1. React JS
2. Angular Js
3. Vue Js

React JS is a very famous library developed by Facebook with a very good documentation present in its official website . Angular JS is also a very famous framework developed by google and is extensively in use. For further information you can visit the official website of angular. Finally comes Vue JS ,it is said to be very lightweight and a combination of the above two.

So what after JavaScript ? Here comes something called bootstrap. Bootstrap is basically a open source CSS framework. It contains JavaScript and CSS based templates which you can just copy and use in your website. Just like bootstrap there are other frameworks also like tailwind CSS and Materialize CSS.

Back-End Web Development

Just like i explained what is front-end , here also I will be explaining what actually is the back end of a site. Let’s directly go to an example, we all use Facebook right , and react on posts. Suppose you react on a post ,close Facebook and open it again. Does the reaction that you gave on the post persists there or it vanishes? obviously it persists there. This is what the back end of a site does. Here it is taking the reaction as a input and storing it in a database. Not only this but registering users , signing in , commenting are all a part of the back end.

Now what shall one learn to be a back end developer? There are endless technologies for this but here I will mentioning the one which are currently having a good demand in the market.

1. PHP

PHP stands for hypertext preprocessor . PHP is in development since many years and has gained a lot of popularity within these years. Many may argue that PHP is outdated , no it is not. It is a great back end language. Even web sites Facebook still uses PHP. Other technologies like wordpress are also based on PHP .

2. Node JS

Yes JavaScript can also be used for back end development and that is what makes Node JS great. It means that just by learning JavaScript you can develop front end as well as back end . Not only this Node JS is famous because of its great libraries .

3. Flask

Flask is a python library for web development . It is very lightweight and if you are in the field of Machine Learning then it will be a great choice for you because ML models are deployed using Flask.

4. Django

Django is another python library for web development . Unlike flask it is generally used to deeply large scale applications. Django has a lot of built in packages which makes it a great library for web development.

Now just using a back end is not going to store your data. For storing your data you need a database. There are various databases that one can and now a days non relational databases are also gaining a lot of popularity. Some of the databases that one can learn are

1. MySQL
2. PostGreSQL
3. MongoDB

Last but not the least after learning these things one can also learn technologies like wordpress which makes the job very easy :).