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Ask HN: For beginners: what is the hardest part while learning web dev?

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41–44 of 44 posts

Re: Ask HN: For beginners: what is the hardest part while learning web dev?

#42
post #25

I graduated as a mechanical engineer and tried to make the switch to web dev but I got caught up in not really knowing what to learn to get an actual job. For instance, I'm a natural at CSS, came as a no brainer, but all places want you to know less and then it was sass and then it was one of those along with gulp and then grunt, and then everybody became crazy about mom and then webpack. This is why I gave up and mo…

May I ask why one would want to switch from a well respected engineering profession to one which literally kids can do? Outside of the HN bubble where there's lots of VC-funded Internet startup employees, webdev is a joke, and I think you see why now.

There's better working conditions in tech, you can get paid more, when you know how to code monetization options open up since it's a lot easier to make money and less risky with a website/store/service than it is making your own physical product, webdev now is also pretty much software development depending on the type of work you do, my engineering background couples very well with program design and also helps out a lot when connecting to physical systems.

Re: Ask HN: For beginners: what is the hardest part while learning web dev?

#43

I think that a majority of "beginnner" tutorials miss the point. They start with the actual HTML/CSS right away. Heck, some even start with jquery as part of a beginning course. I really believe in learning the "why" of something and not just the "what" or "how". For example, if you really want to learn web dev, you have to learn to some extent how the internet works, what are the various protocols for web (http vs f…

I think going front to back is valid too. Restyling wordpress yields usable results qiuckly, which is great for motivation. And motivation might be the most important things if you learn it by yourself. It's just important to take your time when encountering issues related to things below. In general there is a fine line in programming: going as high level as possible only gets you in to trouble when things go wrong…

I don't think this is true. I have worked with people who don't know enough going down the stack of web programming (and been one of them). They couldn't fix bugs as easily as I could. I'm sure there are other consequences, probably design related, but the bug one is apparent to me because I help when I can.

Re: Ask HN: For beginners: what is the hardest part while learning web dev?

#44
post #37

In my opinion, it's the sheer amount of options available. It's overwhelming. First of all, the tooling. Should I use NPM, Bower, Gulp, Grunt, Webpack or something else? What text editor should I use? Visual Studio code? Sublime? Vim? Emacs? Something else? What Javascript framework should I use? React? Angular.js? Angular2? Vue.js? Do everything with jQuery? Something else? What CSS framework should I use? Bootstrap…

You will get plenty of strong opinions and materials on the tremendous amount of JS framework and libraries. In the end, choosing what is best for you is a balancing act, and there is no clear winner.

One benefit of learning Dart + Angular(.dart) is that you get an efficient programming environment with batteries included. The toolchain includes the usually required tools (SASS included, it is now implemented in Dart first and is ported to other platforms afterwards). The learning curve is small(er than usual), the tools are great.

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