How to Become a Web Developer

In this video, I'm going to tell you how to become a web developer. I'm going to give you an overview of the technologies you have to learn in order to get there. So let's get started. So web development is primarily concerned with applications that are running the browser. So web developers, there are software developers who specialize in computer programs that run primarily on the browser. Think of social media, e-commerce websites, all that kind of stuff, all those kind of websites that are interactive, there are applications, apps. So web developers, they are categorized in two ways. First one, we have front-end developers. Front-end developers, they're mostly concerned with the client side of the application. That's basically what you see when you visit a website or a web app. It's the visual part what everybody sees. So those are front-end developers. They focus on that part. Now there are other kinds of developers, web developers. They're called back-end developers. Now those guys are more concerned with what happens behind the scenes in the server side. Now when you access a website or a web app, what do you see is the front-end. Now that data that's represented visually to you, some of that data has to be stored somewhere and that somewhere is the back-end. So the front-end communicates with the back-end. So they need a way to store the data. Need a way to retrieve that data. So all that data management is done in the back-end. So that's what back-end developers focus on, on the data management of the data. Now some people, some developers, they can do both front-end and back-end work. Those are called full-stack developers. Okay? It's another term that just means you can do front-end or back-end. You can do both. Okay? Now let's talk about which path you're going to take. So you don't know you want to become a front-end developer or a back-end developer or you want to be both as a full-stack developer. So you can try first learning front-end developer, see what's like, and then if you don't like it, try back-end developer, see if you like, and then you choose one of them, stick with it and that can be your career. Now there's another kind of training you can take. You can also take the full-stack training and that training you're going to learn both the back-end and the front-end. Now whether you start a front-end or back-end, you can do both. I recommend you start with perhaps front-end and then you transition into the back-end part, but always make sure that you do it, you're learning one step at a time. But you're not going to learn everything at once. You got to start slow, start the first step. For example, if you start from the front-end side, you learn everything in order that you need to know. For the front-end, then when you get that done, you proceed to the back-end and you learn the things you need to learn for the back-end. And then you got a full-stack training and I think if you do that, you got a better understanding of how the whole thing works, how the whole process of web development works. And that's very important because even if you do not become a full-stack development, you have to interact with your developer counterparts. Maybe you're a front-end developer and you have to interact with the back-end engineers. So the back-end developer is going to, you need to communicate with them to know how you're going to implement, how you're going to program your front-end, how is it going to work with their back-end and so on. So that interaction, if you know some back-end development as a front-end developer or if you know some front-end development as a back-end developer, then you can make that, you can have a better communication when you're doing your work. So it's up to you which path to take. I suggest to try it out, both of them. One at a time, one step at a time. Now I'm going to talk about how to get started on the front-end side. As I mentioned before, I think starting from the front-end might be easier than doing the other way around, starting from the back-end and transitioning to the front-end. So to get started in the front-end part, I highly suggest you learn these three things in order. First you need to learn HTML. HTML is short for hypertext markup language. So essentially any website that you see, the core structure of the website or web application is written with HTML. Now HTML, it's like a, it defines the structure of a document. So every website, web app on its core is just a document, HTML document that has some kind of structure that is made up with things called tags. So that's the first thing you have to learn, HTML. Now the second thing you have to learn after you learn HTML, it's very important that you first learn HTML and you get a good foundation on that. The second part is CSS. CSS is short for cascading style sheets. What CSS does is essentially make your website or web app pretty. So it allows you to customize the appearance of the web app or the web pages. CSS deals with stuff like fonts, color, alignment, position, and so on. So while HTML gives you the structure, it's like the skeleton of your application. CSS is going to give you the substance, the muscles, and the skin, everything that makes up the appearance of the application. Now finally the third thing you have to learn is JavaScript. JavaScript is the implementation of a program in language called ECMAScript. Now with JavaScript you can implement interaction in your web pages and that essentially make common static websites into dynamic websites or so-called web applications or apps. So essentially JavaScript allows you to control the behavior of your website and make it interactive because just the HTML of CSS by itself, they make what are called static pages. And there's not much you can do with them. You cannot interact with them. You can just read them as if it were a document or with text and pretty things and images and that kind of stuff. But how do you interact with it? As the way, for example, with social media you post something and then somebody else sees it and then they leave comments and there's all this sort of interaction where you write things and you post it. There's that button and then something pops up and then you click somewhere and does some animation or whatever. So that's the role of JavaScript. To take a website, a static website, make it dynamic and make it a web application. So that's JavaScript. Now that's, those are the three things you need to learn. Put the front end. Now how are you going to learn it? Well I suggest you go online and do a search for HTML first and then you're going to see that a lot, there's a lot of resources out there online that you can use to learn HTML. And just go there, some beginner HTML tutorial course or whatever. Just go there and start learning. All you need is your computer and a text editor. That's all and everybody, every computer should have that. You only need the ability to type. That's all you need, ability to type on the keyboard. So now let's talk about the back end. We learned the front end, three things HTML, CSS, JavaScript. Now the back end. Now for the back end, it is essential that you learn one popular programming language. But asking that you learn many programming languages. You don't have to. You only need one, one popular programming language. Now for the back end, there are many programming languages out there, many, many programming languages. But there are those programming languages that are kind of easier to get started with. Some of them are Ruby, Python or Node.js. Those are kind of easy to get started. Now the third one I mentioned here, Node.js, is actually JavaScript on the server side. So for the front end, we have the third element we had to learn, it was JavaScript, right? But that's for the client side, the browser side. Now JavaScript used to be that it only ran in the browser. But now it also runs on the server side. So you can make a back end with JavaScript. That's called Node.js. So if you learn JavaScript from the front end, and you come to the back end, if you don't want to learn a new language, you could try Node.js. But keep in mind it would be nice if you learn a language different from JavaScript for the back end, because you might not always have the same languages for the front end of back end when you go out there and find a job. Now there are some more difficult languages you can learn, more difficult ones I say for beginners. And those are Java or C sharp. So Java is a very, very, very popular language, and it's widely used in the back end. And there are a lot of other things, including Android programming for mobile development, that kind of stuff. C sharp is from Microsoft, and it's also popular language, not only in web development, but you can also use it for games, game development, very popular. If you learn these languages, you have the bonuses of also opening up a door to other kinds of developments other than web development. So that's something interesting to consider. Now after you learn a popular language for the back end, it's time to learn a web framework. So what a web framework does for you is essentially it already has rules for you to write your program in a way that's going to be manageable, and you know exactly what to do and how to write it. Because if you didn't have a framework, then you got to start from scratch. And then you're going to ask yourself, how am I going to build a back end application from scratch? How am I going to structure this? What goes where? You know, it's going to be hard to start from scratch. You're going to have to do a lot of stuff by yourself. So you have to learn a web framework. It's going to make everything more convenient and easy for you. What's good about a web framework is that it already has an established set of rules that you have to follow in order to build that application. So you're going to hear this concept of convention over configuration that comes from Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails is a web framework that you can learn if you choose to learn to have learned the Ruby programming language. It's very popular and it makes things convenient. And you can rapidly prototype your applications and build them. So that's Ruby on Rails if you did learn Ruby. Now if you did Python, there's Django, the Django framework. Now keep in mind, I've just mentioned a one framework for each language. It doesn't mean there's only that framework. There can be many, many different frameworks for a certain programming language. I'm just listing a popular one for each language here. Next one is if you learn Node.js, which is just JavaScript on the server side, you can do Express. Now if you chose to learn a more difficult language like Java, you can do Spring Boot for your web framework. And many of these frameworks, you can use a pattern called the MVC pattern. You're going to hear that a lot called the model view controller pattern of building back in. So keep that in mind. And I said that because the last framework that I mentioned here is called ASP.NET MVC, which you can use to C-sharp other languages. This is from Microsoft by the way. And it has the word MVC, the term MVC. So that's what I said before. It's a way of structuring your back end application, your framework, like Rails' MVC. And ASP.NET MVC, it's called the model view controller. Okay. Now let's talk about the final aspect of the back end. And that's the database. So after you learn a programming language for the back end and then you learn a web framework, you need a way to start your information. Where is your information for your application going to go? Well, it goes into what's called the database. The most popular type of database is called a relational database. There's the term, the abbreviation, R-D-V-M-S. It just means relational database management system. So for that kind of database, which is the most popular, you're going to have to learn SQL, short for structured query language. So SQL is language they can use to describe your data. How are your data is going to be structured? Now keep in mind, when you learn this, you typically learn in the context of a certain flavor of SQL, certain implementation. There are many kinds of database implementations of SQL or so-called SQL. People say SQL. One of them is MySQL or MySQL. So that's a very popular one that you can use to learn to get started with back end stuff. Okay? Now I would like to point out that you don't necessarily have to learn SQL. There are all the kinds of databases. And for example, they're called NoSQL databases and they have become extremely popular in recent years in the past decade or so. One of them is called MongoDB. And if you want to give it a try and learn a NoSQL database, you should definitely look into that one. It's a very, very popular database. And in a way, NoSQL databases are kind of simpler than SQL. But I highly suggest that you take a look at SQL because it is one, perhaps not, if not the most popular kind of database, and it's been around for quite some time. It's pretty much a standard. And it gives you a relational structure to your database so things are related to each other. While in MongoDB, you don't quite get that, although you can kind of simulate. Okay? So to sum it up, we learn about the technologies we have to learn if we want to get into web development. You can follow the front end way, front end path or the back end path, or you can do both. For the front end, you should learn three things. The first one is HTML, second is CSS, third one is JavaScript. For the back end part, you need to learn a popular programming language. Then once you get a language down, you can learn a web framework for that language that works with that language. And then finally, you need to learn a database, some kind of database, the most popular one being SQL, a relational kind of database. So you can also try no SQL if you want, but I highly recommend SQL. So I think that's it for this video, and I'll see you on the next time. Have a good one.