To become a great front-end developer, like any other skill, takes 10,000 hours of practice. That is around 4 years in 40 hour weeks. Here are some pointers I have gathered by reading about becoming a front-end developer and practicing the art over the course of 9 months:
-Start by learning to create layouts. No matter what, it is necessary to know semantically correct HTML inside-out. Although most of the people use boilerplate code, as the one I am using right now trying to learn React, it is important to fully understand how the layout of a web page works. This also includes learning about how a browser renders a page. (create the DOM tree > parse the style > render the layout > paint the page). It takes only 3 days to fully read and understand HTML, although every time you switch sources of learning, there is overlap of information. But it is worth it.
Once you learn CSS, you could go back to HTML to round off the information just right.
-Just like HTML, the next step is learning CSS. There are a few key concepts in CSS: Flexbox, float, the use of 'auto' in measuring dimensions, text-align, various types of 'display' and different types of 'position'. Currently, Flexbox is the holy-grail of layout creation, but a new technology called 'Grid' is coming out soon.
A great skill to invest in is SASS or SCSS. This helps you nest CSS containers inside one another, modularize the code and makes your job easy by taking care of cross-browser prefixes.
-After that, one must learn a little bit about JavaScript and jQuery; at least the DOM manipulation part. This much, both a web developer and designer must know. If you are looking to become a developer, you must start learning data structures and algorithms in JavaScript.
Here is a link to a free e-book about data structures and algorithms in JavaScript.
One must then start learning about advanced JavaScript technologies such as React and Angular.
React is currently gaining ground and Angular, losing ground as I have learned from a few front-end professionals.
If you are having doubts choosing between Web-development and Web-design or confused about how to enter the industry, there are various ways depending upon your qualifications. If you have a computer science background, it is almost always good to start as a web-developer. If you decide to invest serious time in UI-UX development, you could start as one provided you put in exclusive effort into it.
I had a designing phase in which I decided to just be a designer, but in my college at the time, I was mostly just coding. This lasted for 3 summer months, after which, I decided to embrace my education and become a web developer first, and then move to design slowly in the commercial ground.
This Quora article might help you understand the differences in fields to enter into the web industry.
And this Skillcrush article might help you know which one you should choose.
So, all the best for your career!
-Start by learning to create layouts. No matter what, it is necessary to know semantically correct HTML inside-out. Although most of the people use boilerplate code, as the one I am using right now trying to learn React, it is important to fully understand how the layout of a web page works. This also includes learning about how a browser renders a page. (create the DOM tree > parse the style > render the layout > paint the page). It takes only 3 days to fully read and understand HTML, although every time you switch sources of learning, there is overlap of information. But it is worth it.
Once you learn CSS, you could go back to HTML to round off the information just right.
-Just like HTML, the next step is learning CSS. There are a few key concepts in CSS: Flexbox, float, the use of 'auto' in measuring dimensions, text-align, various types of 'display' and different types of 'position'. Currently, Flexbox is the holy-grail of layout creation, but a new technology called 'Grid' is coming out soon.
A great skill to invest in is SASS or SCSS. This helps you nest CSS containers inside one another, modularize the code and makes your job easy by taking care of cross-browser prefixes.
-After that, one must learn a little bit about JavaScript and jQuery; at least the DOM manipulation part. This much, both a web developer and designer must know. If you are looking to become a developer, you must start learning data structures and algorithms in JavaScript.
Here is a link to a free e-book about data structures and algorithms in JavaScript.
One must then start learning about advanced JavaScript technologies such as React and Angular.
React is currently gaining ground and Angular, losing ground as I have learned from a few front-end professionals.
If you are having doubts choosing between Web-development and Web-design or confused about how to enter the industry, there are various ways depending upon your qualifications. If you have a computer science background, it is almost always good to start as a web-developer. If you decide to invest serious time in UI-UX development, you could start as one provided you put in exclusive effort into it.
I had a designing phase in which I decided to just be a designer, but in my college at the time, I was mostly just coding. This lasted for 3 summer months, after which, I decided to embrace my education and become a web developer first, and then move to design slowly in the commercial ground.
This Quora article might help you understand the differences in fields to enter into the web industry.
And this Skillcrush article might help you know which one you should choose.
So, all the best for your career!
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