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Ask HN: Online resources for beginner web dev/design

by antoko on 5/14/15, 2:04 AM with 11 comments

My stepson (19, no college) is going to explore web development and design. He doesn't have any prior experience. I'm looking for free online resources for him to get some exposure. I was thinking html,css,jQuery on codecademy to start with, and then introducing JavaScript. What else is out there? Is there anything similar for the design side of things?

  • by briandrum on 5/14/15, 4:18 AM

    For a free, high quality introduction to HTML and CSS, take a look at http://learn.shayhowe.com.

    A few others I’m aware of but less familiar with:

    http://tutorials.codebar.io http://howtocodeinhtml.com http://learnlayout.com

  • by lollipop25 on 5/14/15, 2:43 AM

    A good place for documentation is MDN (Mozilla Developer Network) https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web. They have extensive documentation with regards to web technologies. I suggest he read up about HTML first, getting the first few basic elements on the page. Then he can move on to CSS to style up the page.

    At this point, you can practically build basic webpages with just HTML and CSS. From here, you can take 2 paths: A graphics designer or a front-end developer.

    A graphics designer leans more to design rather than building apps. This requires a basic of jQuery, but mastery of Photoshop. A good place to learn is reading articles from Smashing Magazine http://www.smashingmagazine.com/

    A front-end developer leans more to app-building rather than design. This requires knowledge of JavaScript libraries and best practices. For this, select your basic set of frameworks and master them. Suggestions range from jQuery, Bootstrap, to full-fledged frameworks like Ember and Angular.

  • by AJAr on 5/14/15, 2:15 AM

    You can check out Treehouse. It's not free, but a great value for the money since you get access to their full library.

    http://teamtreehouse.com/tracks

  • by tmuir on 5/17/15, 3:25 AM

    I really like www.w3schools.com They go through HTML, CSS, JS, JQuery, and a ton of other stuff. I'm sure they're not the only site that does this, but I found the "Try it Yourself" feature to be extremely helpful. Every single concept has an built in editor with example code/markup, so you can see it in action, change it, break it, whatever.