41–50 of 62 posts
You could do worse than: https://pragprog.com/titles/rails7/agile-web-development-wit... (note, not quite finished yet - last chapters should be done in ultimo January).
So I did the same - circled back to html/css/js first. I'd keep this part very light though. If you can code already (any language) then a couple hours skimming over html/css/js gets you far enough to grasp the absolute basics. After that I'd stick to the "exciting web dev" part and circle back to basics on an adhoc basis.
There is a very real risk of losing enthusiasm here so there is definitely something to be said for rushing towards something that works and does something.
I've found code-along youtube sites to be the best. Traversy Media, Web Dev Simplified and James Q Quick are my go to channels. Also Fireship channel is very useful - they have 100 sec descriptions of most web technologies helpful for "wtf is it and do I need this?".
>`cron` jobs; database persistence; difference/explanations of when to use bare-metal v. vps v. vm; what there is to know about reverse-proxying and load balancers and how to correctly setup and deploy those and so on?
You don't need any of that at this stage. In the medium term a VPS would be useful though...web dev on local machine hits limitations in the sense that local isn't all that "web" and vps is good for learning linux basics too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would strongly advise against react if you are looking to learn the fundamentals. By all means learn about raw DOM manipulation with JavaScript first , but do not go directly for react. We are repeating the same issues we had years ago where people started conflating JavaScript with jQuery - people are conflating JavaScript with react l. JavaScript is an insanely powerful flexible and widely deployed language. It i…
> By all means learn about raw DOM manipulation with JavaScript first Yep, where is the documentation for modern JS without any libraries? Preferably something that doesn't try to teach you what an if and a loop are first.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would strongly advise against react if you are looking to learn the fundamentals. By all means learn about raw DOM manipulation with JavaScript first , but do not go directly for react. We are repeating the same issues we had years ago where people started conflating JavaScript with jQuery - people are conflating JavaScript with react l. JavaScript is an insanely powerful flexible and widely deployed language. It i…
> By all means learn about raw DOM manipulation with JavaScript first Yep, where is the documentation for modern JS without any libraries? Preferably something that doesn't try to teach you what an if and a loop are first.
0. Don’t waste your time dicking around with tools. Save that immaturity for the children you will ultimately replace.
1. Make a new language in XML Schema. This will teach you about node relationships, DOM theory, lexical models, semantics and data description. The things you will learn from this will shape everything else.
2. Learn accessibility. This will expand your learnings from step 1 in a very practical way. Added benefits are better SEO and slimmer more precise HTML code. When I say learn accessibility I mean to take this seriously. It is a qualitative investment and not checking a box in a checklist.
3. Learn CSS. When you really learn CSS well you will gain the confidence to create any kind of visual presentation without ruining your accessible HTML.
4. Learn the DOM. Again, this reinforces everything learned in the prior steps. Walking the DOM in Firefox is as much as 250000x faster than querySelectorAll. The DOM is the backbone of everything in web frontend technology.
5. Now it’s time to learn JavaScript, but I recommend jumping straight to TypeScript. Type everything and keep your type definitions extremely primitive. In TypeScript clever code is very slow to compile.
To really really understand frontend JavaScript well all you really need is a thorough understanding of the lexical scope model, functions, and events. Functions are first class citizens, which means functions can be used anywhere primitive types can be used. If you can understand those three with great confidence you can do 98% of everything you will need in the language.
6. Finally, don’t listen to the ignorance. Most of the opinions I have seen in my 25 years of web development are about what people can’t do and how hard life is, great insecurity searching for validation. Toss all of this negativity and weakness aside. Instead, always focus on what you can do. Less is more. When you push yourself to exceed your potential after great effort you will do what the complainers can’t.
Not exactly what you’re asking for, but Rails Tutorial is pretty good: https://www.railstutorial.org/ Closer to what you want is Free Code Camp, which is pretty good for front end stuff: https://www.freecodecamp.org/
There is nothing more boring than Rails + Postgres! Maybe Django and Postgres…
My definition of boring is a good looking web page with a CRUD flow and user authentication.
This is an afternoon exercise with Rails, a good tutorial, and a couple gems and a bootstrap theme deployed to Heroku or Elastic Beanstalk.
Compare to having to navigate the latest Typescript, SPA front end, server side component, nosql and serverless deployment hotness.
What is your programming language of choice? Do you want server-side rendered app or will your app require client-side processing? Do you anticipate that the app will, at some point in the future, need to be scaled to multiple servers? Once you answer these questions, then what boring tech stack to choose will become easier. One example I will give you of a boring stack, but highly effective, that I know of. Postgres…
The asker wants to know about HTML and CSS. Why are you suggesting HAProxy for load balancing?
Perhaps look for web development books published around 2010-2012, before the large JS frameworks gained a major foothold. These will be missing some of the very valuable and useful developments in CSS and JavaScript (e.g. grid layout and promises) but for the other topics much of their content will still be relevant. There's also the Indie Web wiki which has lots of getting started guides for hosting your own websit…
I don't think this is a good idea. JS made some extremely useful improvements starting with ES6 (so, 2015).