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Ask HN: Online resources for beginner web dev/design

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Re: Ask HN: Online resources for beginner web dev/design

#11

Post by joshschreuder »

antoko wrote: post #10
joshschreuder wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CodeSchool ( http://codeschool.com/ ) is another similar one to Team Treehouse. Their HTML / CSS ones are paid, but they have a free Javascript intro one: https://www.codeschool.com/courses/javascript-road-trip-part...

Thanks, this looks pretty similar to codecademy, have you done the courses? Any reason in particular to choose this over codecademy? I guess he can try the free ones and see if he finds additional value.

I have done a number of the CodeSchool ones, they are a video tutorial followed by an interactive code editor thing like Codecademy.

The difference is that Codecademy doesn't have the video beforehand (you read the instructions and do the exercise), vs. CodeSchool which gives a bit more of an in-depth explanation then you do the exercise.

I guess it comes down to which method of learning your stepson prefers.

Re: Ask HN: Online resources for beginner web dev/design

#13

Post by lollipop25 »

antoko wrote: post #6
lollipop25 wrote: post #5

A good place for documentation is MDN (Mozilla Developer Network) https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web . They have extensive documentation with regards to web technologies. I suggest he read up about HTML first, getting the first few basic elements on the page. Then he can move on to CSS to style up the page. At this point, you can practically build basic webpages with just HTML and CSS. From here, you can ta…

Thanks for the smashing magazine link, should be worth exploring. While the MDN resources are great I was looking for more interactive tutorials. I'm hoping the gameification format used by codecademy will pull him in. Experince tells me his enthusiasm is inversely proportional to my own, so I'm hoping he can catch the bug without me having to walk through it with him.

You can provide him an IDE setup to give the errors. Sublime Text can be set up with plugins that provide immediate feedback about code errors. Just select a few for HTML, for CSS and for JS.

As for the gamification, https://codecombat.com/

Re: Ask HN: Online resources for beginner web dev/design

#14

Post by tmuir »

I really like www.w3schools.com They go through HTML, CSS, JS, JQuery, and a ton of other stuff. I'm sure they're not the only site that does this, but I found the "Try it Yourself" feature to be extremely helpful. Every single concept has an built in editor with example code/markup, so you can see it in action, change it, break it, whatever.
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