I think I opened a coding can of worms!

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I've mentioned previously that I've been using my spare time to learn some new skills following being made redundant. I've worked with software development teams for the last 4 years of my career, but have never done any form of development myself. I thought it about time to dip my toe in the development world.

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I decided to start with HTML and what a can of worms that has opened!

I managed to get my head around the basics of HTML fairly quickly ... well I've plenty of time on my hands. That fairly instantly led to delving into CSS which I now have a basic grasp of and now I'm heading down the rather bumpy road of JavaScript and PHP. I'm sure it's a smooth road for some but my brain is getting frazzled!

I've been mostly learning through CodeCademy as I really like their interface. The screen is split into three where the left column provides content to learn or some instructions, the middle column is an editor and the right column shows you the result when you "run" your code. It also provides some tests. However, the pace is fairly quick so I've also been using Pluralsight to backup my learnings. Pluralsight is more presentation based; think classroom learning. I used Pluralsight courses to learn some Linux skills a few months back.

I've found YouTube to also be a useful resource to fill in some gaps. I've found there are many resources for learning individual languages but they all seem to miss out something which I think is rather fundamental. That is how all these things bolt together? What are their uses? That's probably not so true for HTML and CSS as there was some cross referencing between courses but JavaScript and PHP was much less clear to me.

I've ended up ordering a book which walks you through a project using all 4 languages to get the what and why clear in my head. I think it'll be sometime before I can call myself a web developer!

I'll maybe start a little series as I work it all out.



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4 comments
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Cool stuff. I am doing some courses on Coursera, which you have to pay for these days, but my company may cover the cost. I want to expand my range to cover some of the popular stuff such as data science as well as filling in some fundamental knowledge. We should never stop learning.

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"We should never stop learning." < I couldn't agree more with this and I'm learning it is becoming more important as I get older.

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I find the hardest thing is not how to learn, but what to learn. Seems every day there is a new javascript framework that is the next big thing. 😅

Doing a full project is a good idea, there is so much info out there in bits and pieces sometimes a good old book to work through it the best option.

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It arrived yesterday and I read the first chapter before bed. Just that alone has filled in many gaps in relation to the what, where and why.

The book covers building a project with PHP, SQL, JavaScript, JQuery, CSS and HTML. I think I need to keep my focus on nailing HTML, CSS and JS but the other snippets will no doubt help.

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