Most web developers have gone through all the stages of requirements discussion, writing web code, testing, going live, and it may be stressful and frustrating for some of them at the beginning, but the overall feeling when they see their website go live and people are using it all over the world is really exciting and amazing. web developers are responsible for a lot of tasks from gathering requirements to designing the website, handling its back-end parts, and making it go live successfully for users. and handling its back-end parts, as well as making it go live successfully for users.
Every year, new technologies and tools emerge in various industries to increase the productivity of developers and make websites better for users. It becomes challenging for them to stay on top of the web development game. Today, we will be discussing the complete guide to becoming a Web Developer in 2024. This will be a practical guide for all kinds of developers (front-end, back-end and full-stack).
What is a Full Stack Web Developer?
A Full Stack Web Developer is a professional with expertise in front-end and back-end web development. They are typically very proficient in languages and frameworks such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, Angular, Node.js, Rubyon Rails, Django, PHP, golang, and more, which allows them to handle all aspects of web applications, from designing user interfaces to managing databases and server-side logic. Full-stack developers combine technical expertise with problem-solving skills, which are often critical to developing dynamic, adaptable websites that provide a seamless user experience.
How in becoming a Full Stack Web Developer?
Determine your goal or direction first
We’re going to talk about a lot of technologies, trends, and tools, but we don’t want you to get overwhelmed, so you need to first decide why you want to become a web developer, as this will help you choose the right tools and technologies to learn. There are many different reasons to become a Web Developer, such as.
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You want to get a job as a programmer as a Web developer, this is the most popular and common reason.
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You want to start your own business as a freelance developer, such as taking on private work.
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You can become a consultant for other companies when you are technically very good.
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You can create your own apps to make money.
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You want to use this skill to become a content creator.
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Program coding as a hobby.
From the above areas of interest or goals, you can choose the right tools and techniques that apply to your goals. If your goal is to become a front-end developer, you can choose tools and techniques for front-end development. The same goes for back-end and full-stack development.
Basic tools and software for Web development
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Computer and operating system: You cannot write code without a computer and an operating system. To learn Web development, you don’t need any fancy computer. If you have one, you can use any type of mid-range laptop or desktop. For the operating system, you can use MacOS, Windows (latest version) or Linux, whatever works for you.
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Text Editor/IDE: There is no doubt that VSCode is suitable for most situations and most languages. It has good performance, excellent extensions, a built-in terminal and tons of features. According to surveys, VSCode is also the preferred choice of developers. You also have some other good choices such as Sublime Text, Vim or Atom. Visual Studio (ASP.net or C#), Eclipse and Netbeans (Java) are also good choices.
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Web Browsers: The first choice for most developers is Chrome or Firefox. Chrome is fast and it uses the V8 engine (JavaScript engine). Firefox has also come a long way, and some of its goodies are not in Chrome. Both browsers have excellent development tools for solving problems in web development. Other web browsers to familiarize yourself with are Safari, Edge, and Brave. Terminal: You will be doing a lot of work on the CLI using some system commands. You can use either the default terminal or a third-party terminal for web development projects. bash, Zsh, Powershell, Git Bash, iTerm, Hyper are all available options.
Start with HTML and CSS
HTML and CSS are the basic building blocks of Web development. No matter how advanced your web application is, or what frameworks and back-end languages you use, you must use HTML and CSS to build your front-end application. So this is the first thing to learn in web development.
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HTML5 (semantic tags, attributes, document types, etc.)
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CSS basics colors, fonts, positioning, box model, etc.
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CSS Grid and Flexbox to align things or create columns.
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Animations are very important for front-end developers.
Responsive Layout
Apps should be viewable and usable on a variety of devices such as smartphones, tablets, desktops, iPads or any other screen size. Therefore, it is important to understand how to create a responsive design or layout. Let’s take a look at some important topics.
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Understanding how to set up viewports
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Media queries for different screen sizes.
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flex layouts
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REM units
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Mobile Layout
Custom Reusable CSS Components
If you want to avoid CSS frameworks like Bootstrap, it’s best to create your own modular, reusable CSS components to use in your projects. If you build your own custom designs, you don’t need to import a full library. You can create components that are only needed for a specific UI.
Saas has also recently seen a new trend that helps to write CSS code more efficiently. If you already know CSS, you don’t need to put much effort into learning Saas, a CSS preprocessor that adds more features to standard CSS and makes it more efficient. You can use variables, nesting, and conditionals to reduce CSS repetition and make it more efficient.
Saas provides variables, mixins, functions, nesting, and more. You can also create separate Saas files for each reusable component.Saas really saves a lot of time, so you should definitely learn it in 2024.
CSS Framework
Learning CSS frameworks is very important and useful for developers who are not good at designing. There are many popular CSS frameworks available and some of them are given below.
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Bootstrap is the most popular CSS framework. Learning bootstrap also helps in learning other frameworks.
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Tailwind CSS is another increasingly popular framework which is slightly different from the others. It is a set of utility classes so you can create your own buttons and other things that look different from other buttons. They are also highly customizable.
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Concrete : Based on material design, the framework is a combination of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. This is also a very useful and popular library for designing your front-end applications.
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Bulma : Modular, lightweight open source CSS framework.
JavaScript
After learning HTML and CSS, the next thing you’ll need to learn is JavaScript, and it’s important for developers to have a basic knowledge of JavaScript. You’ll be using a lot of JavaScript in server-side languages like PHP, Python, or ASP.net, and it’s very important to learn this language if you want to use React, Angular, NodeJS, Vue, or any other JavaScript framework or library.
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JavaScript basics (variables, functions, loops, arrays, conditionals, etc.)
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DOM (Document Object Model)
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Array methods foreach, map, filter, reduce, etc.
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JSON (JavaScript Object Representation)
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HTTP request to get API – GET, POST, PUT, DELETE
Learning Tools and Techniques
There are a number of tools that you will use in Web development. These tools will help you with debugging, productivity, managing code, collaborating with other developers, and that sort of thing. Let’s discuss some of these tools.
Git (version control) and GitHub are the most popular tools you should definitely learn in 2024, and Git is great for collaborating with other developers and managing code. You also have some other options, such as GitLab, Bitbucket, and a few others.
Learn how to use browser development tools. Whether it’s Chrome or Firefox, you should know how to use the different tabs, such as the Elements tab, the JavaScript console, the Web tab for requests and responses, the Applications tab, and other tabs for different purposes.
Most IDEs or text editors have the ability to add extensions or plug-ins, which can be very helpful for productivity and building web applications. For example, the VSCode extension in Visual Studio Code makes it easy to download extensions such as live-server or live-saas compilers for use with React.
Learn how to use JavaScript package managers such as NPM and Yarn If you use a JavaScript framework or library such as React, you’ll make heavy use of these package managers, but for other languages such as Python or PHP, you’ll use a different package manager.
If you want to install NPM packages on your front-end, then you have to use a JS module packager such as Webpack, Parcel, or Rollup. If you want to create your own modules, or if you want to bring one JavaScript file into another, you can’t do that by default using just the browser, so you’ll need Webpack or Parcel to bundle it for you.
You might also want to check out some useful text editor extensions and helper programs. linting (finding errors), Prettier (formatting code), Live Server, Emmet (writing fast HTML and CSS code), snippets, and more.
Front-end frameworks and state management
Frameworks allow you to do more advanced front-end development. It provides you with many advantages such as reusable components, more organized UI, or page interactions. Therefore, using a framework can save a lot of time.
Choose a front-end framework to improve your skills and try to choose one that most companies use in the current scenario. Also, understand state management. Every framework has a different approach. Here are some popular frameworks and state managers.
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React: The React library is the most popular learning library for web development and is quite easy to learn compared to other frameworks and libraries. React developers have a lot of work to do as well. You can use Redux and Context APIs along with Hooks for state management.
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Vue: Vue is also gaining popularity and developers can prefer to learn Vue. compared to React and Angular, Vue is the easiest to learn. Vue is a state manager built for views.
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Angular: This framework is usually used in large organizations. It has a fairly long learning curve. You must learn TypeScript to use Angular, which allows you to use optional static typing and support for ES2015 features. NgRx and Services are good state managers for learning this framework.
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Svelte: Svelte is basically a compiler that has become very popular in the last year or two. It has a very easy learning curve, but you may have some difficulties when working with some larger applications. It’s also a little harder to find work than other frameworks. Svelte has a built-in context API for managing state.
Learning a back-end or server-side language
You should know at least one server-side language. To choose a language in 2024, some of them are given below.
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NodeJS (not a language but a runtime environment)
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Python (good for beginners)
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Java (good for large companies)
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Php
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golang
Backend or server-side frameworks
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Node.js– Express, Koa, Adonis, Feather.js, Nest.js, Loopback
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Java: Spring, SpringBoot, SpringMVC
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PHP: Laravel, Symfony, Codeignitor, Slim
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Ruby: Ruby on Rails, Sinatra
Databases
Most web applications need a location to store data. In some cases, certain technologies or certain languages complement certain databases. For example, in Mern, M stands for MongoDB, and in LAMP, M stands for MySQL, but it’s entirely up to you to choose which database for your application. We’ll discuss some of the popular databases of 2024.
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Relational Databases: RDBMS is still the most popular database. postgreSQL, MySQL, and MSSQL are still the most popular to use.
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NoSQL: MongoDB, CouchDB, Elasticsearch
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Lightweight and Caching: Redis, SQLite
