My guide to web theory the boring way: 0. Don’t waste your time dicking around with tools. Save that immaturity for the children you will ultimately replace.

My guide to web theory the boring way: 0. Don’t waste your time dicking around with tools. Save that immaturity for the children you will ultimately replace. 1. Make a new language in XML Schema. This will teach you about node relationships, DOM theory, lexical models, semantics and data description. The things you will learn from this will shape everything else. 2. Learn accessibility. This will expand your learnings from step 1 in a very practical way. Added benefits are better SEO and slimmer more precise HTML code. When I say learn accessibility I mean to take this seriously. It is a qualitative investment and not checking a box in a checklist. 3. Learn CSS. When you really learn CSS well you will gain the confidence to create any kind of visual presentation without ruining your accessible HTML. 4. Learn the DOM. Again, this reinforces everything learned in the prior steps. Walking the DOM in Firefox is as much as 250000x faster than querySelectorAll. The DOM is the backbone of everything in web frontend technology. 5. Now it’s time to learn JavaScript, but I recommend jumping straight to TypeScript. Type everything and keep your type definitions extremely primitive. In TypeScript clever code is very slow to compile. To really really understand frontend JavaScript well all you really need is a thorough understanding of the lexical scope model, functions, and events. Functions are first class citizens, which means functions can be used anywhere primitive types can be used. If you can understand those three with great confidence you can do 98% of everything you will need in the language. 6. Finally, don’t listen to the ignorance. Most of the opinions I have seen in my 25 years of web development are about what people can’t do and how hard life is, great insecurity searching for validation. Toss all of this negativity and weakness aside. Instead, always focus on what you can do. Less is more. When you push yourself to exceed your potential after great effort you will do what the complainers can’t.