Note: This guide is geared towards Mac and Linux users
Tutorials are great for learning how to building anything in software. I use them all the time when I want to learn how to do something. The problem for beginners is that these tutorials assume the reader has prerequisite knowledge of some foundational concepts. For the beginner, these "foundational" concepts are actually big concepts that can make or break someone's extended interest in learning.
This purpose of this guide to help get you started on your own software journey. These docs won't make you a software development expert ( I am definitely not one), but will teach you enough of the basics so that you can follow along with tutorials and know where to look when you have questions.
If one or more of the following describes you, this may be a good place to start:
- You are new to coding
- You have some experience coding and want to get back into it
- You have gone through tutorials online and have a good feel for the syntax, but don't know how to start from scratch.
Each mini-lesson of this guide will focus on a different topic. There will be a natural progression to topics, but feel free to jump around.
Part 1: The Basics
- Shell commands and how to use them
- Set up a code editor
- Rapid fire HTML and CSS
- 60-second intro to Javascript
- Build an interactive web site in 10 minutes
- CSS Frameworks: Better results and way less work
- Intro to Node.js and npm
- Revisiting Javascript
- Web Server I: Client/Server Concepts and REST API
- Web Server II: Build a Simple API Server with Express.js
- Modules, imports, and exports
- Where to go from here