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Web Development for Beginners – A Curriculum

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Re: Web Development for Beginners – A Curriculum

#31

Post by solarengineer »

devnulll wrote: post #22
jholman wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What W3C resources have you been using?

We've been using this one: https://www.w3schools.com/html/ He's had no trouble at all following along and using their tooling. I've been mostly hands-off. I'm about to graduate him from "do it in just the browser" to using GitHub pages. That way he can have an HTML site that's "his" and start putting the pieces together.

You may also want to consider a Droplet for his next website. He will learn about the plumbing.

That way, when ever he is filled with self-doubt and needs reaffirmation, he would be able to put things together from the ground up and regain confidence.

Re: Web Development for Beginners – A Curriculum

#32

Post by pkdpic »

Its probably just me but I guess I teach web dev professionally so I might as well say that I was really excited to see something like this for free from Microsoft but confused to see so much time spent on a canvas app and backend functionality seemingly crammed into the last few sections somehow.

I guess it's fine to just have a frontend curriculum but just confused at why this is noteworthy maybe.

Im sure this is a big deal for some reason and Im just too dumb to realize why. I honestly wish I had time to go through all of this just to get inside their heads in terms of education strategy etc.

Also I kinda hate React but shouldn't they be introducing React or Vue or something? Who's the target audience here? Job seekers? Bored tweens? Time traveling developers from 2005? Me?

Re: Web Development for Beginners – A Curriculum

#33

Post by bigDinosaur »

devnulll wrote: post #24
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Pedagogy" - I don't know what that means It means “teaching methods”.

The meta-point is that the usage of complex words is off-putting to those trying to learn something for the first time. There's always an element of "I don't know what this is, so I can skip it" but better to keep topics simple and approachable.

What is a 'complex word'? I'm serious. If you google 'pedagogy definition' you get an easy to understand definition. If you're not willing to google things, you aren't ready to be a web developer.

Method names alone will drop you way out of the simple english, top 1k words simplification paradigm.

Re: Web Development for Beginners – A Curriculum

#34

Post by ogma »

devnulll wrote: post #24
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Pedagogy" - I don't know what that means It means “teaching methods”.

The meta-point is that the usage of complex words is off-putting to those trying to learn something for the first time. There's always an element of "I don't know what this is, so I can skip it" but better to keep topics simple and approachable.

No post body was provided.

Re: Web Development for Beginners – A Curriculum

#35

Post by tmpz22 »

dgritsko wrote: post #6

I recently had a conversation with an "absolute beginner" and it was a stark reminder just how much knowledge I take for granted. It really is extremely challenging to try and build up a base of knowledge starting with no prior experience, and it's great to see examples of this done right.

It devolves into “here’s this really dumb thing that we deal with, oh and this stupid thing is to deal with Y” - it’s really hard to be cynical with trying to break down the layers of abstraction and how they came to be.

Re: Web Development for Beginners – A Curriculum

#36

Post by csnover »

devnulll wrote: post #22
jholman wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What W3C resources have you been using?

We've been using this one: https://www.w3schools.com/html/ He's had no trouble at all following along and using their tooling. I've been mostly hands-off. I'm about to graduate him from "do it in just the browser" to using GitHub pages. That way he can have an HTML site that's "his" and start putting the pieces together.

Just so you know, W3C is the main standards body for the web; w3schools is an unaffiliated privately-run web site with an intentionally confusing name. A much better general web resource—certainly for any intermediate-or-above learning, but probably also for beginners—is MDN[0].

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn

Re: Web Development for Beginners – A Curriculum

#37

Post by AlchemistCamp »

devnulll wrote: post #24
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Pedagogy" - I don't know what that means It means “teaching methods”.

The meta-point is that the usage of complex words is off-putting to those trying to learn something for the first time. There's always an element of "I don't know what this is, so I can skip it" but better to keep topics simple and approachable.

My meta point is, "Don't give up. Everything is learnable!"

My first real tech job was in a country and office where the working language was one I didn't speak while growing up. If I came across words at work I needed and didn't know, I looked them up or asked for clarification and learned them.

Re: Web Development for Beginners – A Curriculum

#38

Post by 4WIW »

devnulll wrote: post #24
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Pedagogy" - I don't know what that means It means “teaching methods”.

The meta-point is that the usage of complex words is off-putting to those trying to learn something for the first time. There's always an element of "I don't know what this is, so I can skip it" but better to keep topics simple and approachable.

I think this is a fair point. What about readability score of the course?

For better accuracy, maybe one needs to take out special terms first.

Re: Web Development for Beginners – A Curriculum

#39

Post by gigatexal »

My sister in law is doing the web dev freecodecamp courses and loving them. She doesn’t have a background in tech but it’s really heartwarming to see her light up when something she envisions in her head can be made to appear on the screen with some HTML and CSS.

Re: Web Development for Beginners – A Curriculum

#40

Post by spoils19 »

jb3689 wrote: post #19
bigDinosaur wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find most of what I do in web dev to be trivial to the point of mind-numbing. People smarter than me from different fields try to do what I do and often have far more difficulty than I'd expect. Job security for me until the ML engineers work out I can probably be mostly replaced by a smarter templating engine!

Modern web development is dumbed down by shared APIs abstracting most of the hard problems into patterns (arguably a good thing as there is way more consistency in web dev than infrastructure), but the concepts are still quite complex. Heck, React alone is a fairly complex piece of software that 90% of its users take completely foregranted let alone understand why it became a popular choice. Low-level front end is no…

It's no surprise that low level frontend is infinitely more performant, accessible and easier to maintain than framework obscured nonsense of this generation.
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