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

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 ftp vs ws etc), what the hell is DNS, the whole client/server cycle (request/response etc) etc. Sure it can help showing actual HTML code to explain http or request/response but I feel a lot of beginner tutorials just focus on the result and not the actual path.

Teach about the document/DOM etc and then write a simple helloworld.html. But then open the web inspector, show them how the request was sent (header,data) and then show the response received from the server.

There is plenty of tutorial on the usual stuff but not many that get real deep which is useful for beginners.

Udacity's CS253 "Web Development"[0] taught by Steve Huffman does exactly that. It uses Python on Google App Engine and Jinja for templating.

It starts from the basics. Tackles forms, handling requests and parameters. Cookie handling and authentication. Hashing (on which he even shares a bit of Reddit history: they didn't hash passwords which allowed them to detect spam accounts using the same password, but then Murphy's Law hit and the laptop was stolen and the database with it). Indices, joins, etc..

He discusses Reddit's architecture evolution and why they made the choices they've made given the context, etc. Sometimes, it boils down to "we chose it because that's what we knew". Other times, "we chose it because we hated the other thing". It's fun to hear him talk about this.

The course is pretty cool and the subtitle "How to Build a Blog" is an understatement. There was no stress on writing beautiful code or something, but the message is clear.

Another course I'm looking into is Stanford's Startup Engineering CS184 by Balaji S. Srinivasan and Vijay S. Pande. It has been discontinued. I just did a flyby and it's pretty much what you're talking about (they do both "big picture" with their reading list (Thiel, Graham, Andreessen, etc) but don't shy away from getting down to "viewport" and CSS, setting up stuff on Heroku, talking about tmux. They apparently did a lot of "why" stuff).

In my opinion, much of learning is done as it would be in a physical system with non catastrophic consequences: doing stuff, analyzing phenomena by the changed quantities and state/side effects, deducing the governing laws. You learn much about CSS from inspecting elements and changing stuff then reading MDN, than from the opposite. The first gives you something to anchor new knowledge to as opposed to starting with a setting that is too formal and abstract..

I mean, even doing Physics one can't be so exact not to approximate and neglect the influence of something at some point and just do a basic thought/physical experiment.

[0]: https://www.udacity.com/course/web-development--cs253

I'm not a fan of PHP as a language, but anyone who denies it hits a sweet spot for deploying applications is seriously confused.

I echo the sentiment expressed here: Learn the building blocks not frameworks.

It's the long way but the investment will pay off. New frameworks come along, you'll pick them easier because you'll already know which building blocks are used.

PHP has such a terrible reputation from all the spaghetti code that's out there, but modern PHP is a pretty solid language when written properly. So long as you are writing good OO code and using an IDE like PHPstorm its a breeze to develop in. Also with Facebook's HHVM performance is on par or better than Java or C#.