4 ms·

Ask HN: What do you recommend for a web development novice?

10 points by jbranchaud 13y ago

My friend, an experienced software engineer, is extremely new to the world of web development. I am building him a list of resources, libraries, tools, workflows, tutorials, etc. to help him get up to speed. I would appreciate the recommendations and suggestions of the HN community.

eguneys 13y ago
my excellent blog http://eguneys.github.io http://eguneys.github.io
tonteldoos 13y ago
Unfortunately I can't contribute much, because I am largely in your friend's boat. Any chance of making whatever list of resources you compile public in a blogpost somewhere?
- jbranchaud 13y ago
  That is exactly what I am hoping to do. I started with a google doc, but I am thinking of moving it over to github at some point. What sorts of useful resources have you encountered? What sorts of things are lacking for your development process? These are ultimately the questions I want to help answer!
  - tonteldoos 13y ago
    I'll try and answer these two, and lump everything else in a group ;) 1) What resources have I encountered (no particular order): - O'Reilly's (oreilly.com) weekly specials on different topics is a good place to get ebooks for good value. - Atlassian's software (Jira, Stash, etc) seem to be quite popular in the web development community, and may be well worth grabbing the free or once-off-$10 versions. - IDE is a very personal choice, but coming from an embedded and toolkit background, I really, really enjoy Jetbrains' IDEs. I've worked with Rubymine and PHPStorm - they're quick to learn, and pretty cheap for personal licenses (<$100). - Depending on your friend's background, web development will have a very different terminology - wikipedia is your friend. - Again, depending on his background, have him check out this list of books: http://siliconangle.com/blog/2011/12/06/top-10-books-on-programming-according-to-stackoverflow-users/ http://siliconangle.com/blog/2011/12/06/top-10-books-on-prog... . I've at least scanned through most of the list, and find it useful from a perspective perspective. - Databases, databases, databases. Web apps are built on these. If he doesn't have a solid background, work on it. - Continuous Integration, unit testing, etc - do not go without these (IMO, not even code review is as important as these). - Does he development on Mac, Linux or Windows? Master whichever platform he is on (Mac and Linux seem to be the more powerful ones - Linux guy myself). 2) What sort of things am I lacking in my development process: - My experience with interface design is minimal, but it seems to be a key component in web development. - I have yet to look into 'you rub my back, I rub yours' setups, where I might do code for someone, and they might do UI design for me (as an example). - RESTful API development - I have little experience, but this is a huge component of web development (along with plain old WSDL type APIs). - Lacking enough knowledge of modern languages to make informed decisions on which language to tackle a problem with. Not a huge issue, ultimately, but would be nice to know more (I'm a C/C++ guy). - Keeping on top of the tool of the week (either programming, or productivity, or whatever) is a chore. So many good tools abound for various scenarios, it's difficult to keep track. 3) I've found that putting together a setup at home or wherever that mimics a dev setup, will help a little on keeping everything together for you. A cheap machine running some combination of the following: - VCS - Wiki - Issue tracking / Agile tracking - CI / Automated build/test/deployment - Code review tool - Development site - Whatever other tool he finds useful in his development workflow The answer is a bit haphazard, but I hope it helps :)
moya 13y ago
I'm also getting started. Is the MDN a good place to start? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web
- jbranchaud 13y ago
  I have personally found their tutorials and HTML docs to be very useful.
jbranchaud 13y ago
Is it generally recommended to start off using some sort of CSS framework like Bootstrap (http://getbootstrap.com/ http://getbootstrap.com/) or Foundation (http://foundation.zurb.com/ http://foundation.zurb.com/)?
- ricardobeat 13y ago
  As a way to quickly build something, yes. If you are interested in learning CSS, no.
- thisisdallas 13y ago
  Actually, I wouldn't recommend that at all. Well, if he is interested in learning fron-end dev I wouldn't recommend that. In my opinion, the best way to learn is to build something. If you want to suggest Bootstrap or Foundation than I would suggest he tries to build another Bootstrap/Foundation. Learn grids, learn CSS psuedo elements and media queries, learn HTML5 semantic markup etc. etc.
ricardobeat 13y ago
This is a good start: http://rmurphey.com/blog/2012/04/12/a-baseline-for-front-end-developers/ http://rmurphey.com/blog/2012/04/12/a-baseline-for-front-end... All the links you'll ever need: https://github.com/christopherscott/frontend-toolbox https://github.com/christopherscott/frontend-toolbox and https://github.com/dypsilon/frontend-dev-bookmarks https://github.com/dypsilon/frontend-dev-bookmarks
- jbranchaud 13y ago
  +1 on the frontend dev bookmarks, I remember seeing that a while back, but had completely forgotten about it! It is an incredible resource.
freigeist 13y ago
Teaching myself, I found the following resources helpful: * Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial: http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ * Steve Huffman's Web Development Class: https://www.udacity.com/course/cs253 https://www.udacity.com/course/cs253 * Balaji Srinivasan's Startup Engineering Class: https://www.coursera.org/course/startup https://www.coursera.org/course/startup