A friendly web development tutorial for complete beginners (2017)

I would say JS is simple, but it’s not easy. :)

I love the language - it is earning me a comfortable income and I am very productive in it, but it requires experience and iron code discipline not to let it bite you!

Don't you mean that it's easy, but not simple?

This is a very well done and pretty comprehensive tutorial.

However, there are plenty of pretty good basic web development tutorials out there, and few, if any of them address what I think is crucial. Once you have all your HTML and CSS and JavaScript all ready to go, how do you actually got about putting that webpage online the right way for the modern internet, including basic security best practices.

As the website name says "interneting is hard," but I think the hardest part for an absolute beginner isn't throwing some HTML but actually getting it online. Googling around will present one with a lot of choices and advice for what to do, at various levels of complexity and it's not at all clear what applies to their particular case. Questions that often need answers are things like:

- What's a domain and how to get one? - What kind of hosting solutions are there and how do I decide which is right for me? - How do I point my domain to my server? - What's a certificate, do I need one and how do I set one up? - How do I make sure I don't get hacked by a script kiddie?

For an absolute beginner web developer, learning HTML and CSS is pretty accessible, they can write, test and iterate on their machine and they can pretty much figure what questions to ask of google and quickly see if the answer works, but when it comes to actually hosting their site, it can be hard to even know what kind of questions to google, much less how to choose the correct answer.

If someone were to ask me to recommend then a tutorial for making a website, I'd probably link to this or one of the other similar tutorials online, but at this point I'm not sure if there's a similar authoritative, modern "How to get your website online" tutorial, although I admit I haven't looked all that hard.

I'm not a native speaker and maybe overstress my understanding of "being hard", but CSS and especially HTML are famous for their simplicity. One can start basic markupped text with a basic text editor in minutes. Of course any advanced features require some learning. But I don't like people calling basic web publishing technologies (which are decades old) to be "hard". Because they are designed to be simple and that's one reason of their huge success.

The basics are not what make them hard. But they are vast in how they can be used and combined to achieve various results. Writing semantically correct, accessible, maintainable markup and CSS is websites that often have thousands of elements on a page (a separate problem, but true), made up of components authored in a CMS with who-knows-what nesting ... etc etc it’s hard. CSS favors conciseness over explicitness, so there are many properties that look like they do one thing but actually do another. That’s hard too, you have to learn not to assume the obvious interpretation of a property name is the correct one.

What often happens is developers duct tape complicated user interfaces together using the basics (because CSS and HTML are considered “easy”) and end up painting themselves into a corner where it’s increasing difficult to manage the code and assistive technology has no idea what’s going on.

For me, letting new developers know that good HTML and CSS is hard helps them to respect the huge surface area involved and be patient with themselves when they struggle. Telling people those things are “easy” makes them feel stupid when they can’t get something working right away.

I guess you cover this by saying advanced features require some learning - but I feel like people hit the hard part of CSS very early on when trying to implement basic patterns that are on most websites.