Become a WordPress Web Developer | From Beginner to Pro

right I want to become a web developer what do I need to do and how long is it gonna take me [Music] guys this is Brett here from Brett dev calm and today I'm gonna do a video and I'm gonna talk you guys through a step-by-step guide for how you can become a full-stack WordPress developer it's gonna be a little bit of a different video today guys I've got so much information that I need to get across to you guys and I have the laptop here with me I've made several notes there's going to be lots and lots of information that we're going to be covering so there may be some chops and changes trip throughout the video and I may be looking to the laptop just to refer to my notes like I said this is not like one of my usual videos this is gonna be an in-depth video there's a ton of info I want to take you through and and show you so basically I get a lot of questions and I would say it's making up for a vast majority of the questions that I receive lately about how to become a web developer so I've spoken about various different things on this channel I've spoken about drop shipping marketing different business opportunities but ultimately it seems to be the case that lots of people who want a location independent lifestyle who want to work online look towards programming and learning to code and people want to become web developers web design web development is what I do it's my full-time job so to speak and hopefully if you if you guys can follow the steps that I outline in this in this video it can be yours as well this video is not going to be about learning to program in various different languages I'm only going to focus on WordPress and while focusing on WordPress I'm going to be focusing on PHP because PHP is the programming language that WordPress is built on okay so as we go through I'm going to be recommending various resources and so if you're if you're looking to become a programmer so you can build iPhone apps if you're looking to become a programmer so you can build software for desktops this is not going to help you this is so you could become a wordpress developer now WordPress is a web development framework it's a CMS platform and when I say a wordpress developer what I'm going to cover is not just how to use wordpress how to add posts to WordPress or to modify WordPress slightly I'm talking about using WordPress as a framework to build websites and larger large websites like web applications you could call the branch so we're going to talk about PHP we're going to talk about plug-in development and basically I'm going to take you through step by step how to get there okay so firstly what I want to talk about is what is a full stack developer so a full stack developer is basically somebody that knows how to code the front end and the back end of a website now what do I mean by that so that the front end of web design is the visual okay so when you load up a web page and you look at a website it has obviously a visual element that you can see and that you can interact with of your mouse with your keyboard sometimes right so that's the front end and that consists of HTML CSS which you may already be familiar with it's very common JavaScript and jQuery so these are the three basics really that control the front end of of your website now all of these free are handled by the browser so that is what we mean by a front end developer and a back end developer is kind of the functionality that goes on behind the scenes of your website so when you click to open a separate link or you do something get an interaction with the server and they cut the code that causes the all this happen in the background these kind of operations to take place this is kind of back-end development and this is where the PHP comes into place so in this video like I say I'm going to talk you through how to become a full stack web developer I'm gonna give you the resources that I would recommend you you read and consume and hopefully within a 6 month period you should be a should be able to do full front-end and back-end development as a full stack developer you should be able to go and get a job either in a company or you may be able to work online as a freelancer and and be location independent there are a lot of developers that are location independent there's still work for companies and they just work remotely so becoming a full-stack developer basically will give you that ability to earn a high paying job or to to work remotely and and a high salary at the same time so WordPress developers typically earn between 50 and 70 grand a year I mean obviously if you're freelancing or running your own agency you could own a lot more now this is that's for like a company right so 50 to 70 grand a years what you can kind of look to be earning as a four-state WordPress developer okay so the first thing I want to mention is that what I recommend you do to learn how to become a developer is you read books there are lots of online courses there are interactive courses like treehouse code school and these are great but I consider these overviews so if you're brand new to web development or if you're brand new to programming any of your not sure if it's for you maybe jump onto treehouse or something like that they have free trials and you can kind of just test the waters go through the courses see how you fare but if you really want to gain good knowledge and you want to build a career out of being web developer you need to read books ok so most of the resources I'm going to recommend throughout this video are books and they're not that expensive you're looking at around $30 a book I recommend probably about 8 or 9 books throughout this video and so for $30 a book you're talking like a couple of hundred dollars and this is like the equivalent of a university education right in six months so not a bad deal towards the end of the video we'll talk about how long it's going to take because I get a lot of questions when people ask me people pretty much say Brett I want to become a web developer what do I need to do and how long is it going to take me so towards the end of this video I'm going to break down how long you could estimate this would take you because it's very hard to answer that question on an individual basis but I am gonna try and answer it for you also throughout these recommendations is going to tell you what you should be doing as you proceed so when you should be stopped when you should start taking on projects what type of projects you should start taking on and how to kind of like merge your study in with kind of starting to kick start in your career so to speak so one final thing to mention like I said this is my actual job so this is what I've been doing for the past 10 15 years and is kind of the approach I took to learn and it worked fine for me I actually kind of went around this a very long way like if I could do it again this is this is what I would do okay like I said use books to learn and if you don't like reading if you're one of these people who just can't stand reading the only advice I can give you is learn to read and learn to love it because as a developer you're gonna be reading your entire career like so if you if you can't read the most basic books and the foundational books to learn to become a programmer you're never really going to progress so you need to if you're not a reader you need to just persevere with it and see if you can kind of become one there are lots of people that have learned just for online courses and so they don't read books but in my opinion you need to be able to read in order to be a good a good program as you consume the resources that I recommend if you don't understand a full book before you move on to the next one make sure that you go back and go over again the parts you don't understand so you can either as you're going through the book double-check things on Google because sometimes a book will give you an explanation and you won't quite understand how the author's describing it so I would recommend like I say go on Google and try and understand it by doing searches ask questions on Stack Overflow it's kind of like a resource for developers or by a separate book if you get if you buy a book that I've recommended and you really just don't understand anything that it's saying which hopefully you should because I'm going to recommend them kind of in a progressive order but if you really don't understand the book sometimes I found it helps to just buy a book that is of a similar kind but from a different author just different authors have different ways of describing things and some might click with you in a better way than others okay so the first resource I'm going to recommend you guys is Photoshop so as a web designer as a developer Photoshop is kind of for graphic designers but if you're building websites you're going to need to be able to manipulate graphical elements and in order to do that you should really be using Photoshop it's kind of the industry standard you can use websites like canva and all these other like on image editors but really as a web developer especially as a full-stack developer that is doing both front and back-end you should be able to do image manipulation and things like that for your website so I would recommend Photoshop and if you never learnt Photoshop before I would recommend you go to lynda.com and sign up for their free trial and go through and the two courses I would recommend are Photoshop CC essential training and that's 15 hours long and I would also recommend Photoshop CC for web design and that's free three hours and 45 minutes long so you've got like 19 19 hours there should take your like a couple of weeks if you do a couple of hours a day and learn Photoshop just before you start getting into web development because it would just be it's kind of you're always going to go go back to it and use it either heavily or lightly throughout your career so it's definitely something you should just just take the two weeks to learn before you get started okay so the first stages of becoming a web developer are to learn HTML and CSS so some of you may already know some HTML CSS it's kind of the foundational language of the browser and it controls all the visual front-end styles that the user sees when they open up a web page okay so it's how you control the the visual elements of a page I would recommend a book called web design with HTML CSS JavaScript and jQuery by John Duquette it's $32.00 is actually two books I was originally just going to recommend a HTML and CSS book and then suggest that maybe you learned some JavaScript and jQuery on top but I come across this it's it's a set it teaches you jQuery and JavaScript as well so I would suggest just learning all at once the book is structured HTML and CSS see one of the HTML and CSS book first and then you want to do the second book on jQuery afterwards so what jQuery is it's basically you have your web page with HTML the styling is CSS and jQuery is kind of like drop-down menus and animations if you want to call them on the page so like I say you don't have to be an expert in jQuery or draft script but it is you will come across it so it's beneficial to at least just read through the jQuery book so you kind of know what's going on roughly you don't need to be an expert you don't have to memorize the whole the whole framework or memorize the whole JavaScript language but just so you understand how jQuery works so this book set kind of covers all of that so it's HTML CSS and the jQuery looks it's $32 and this is 1152 pages long so I'm going to mention how long these books are because towards the end I'm gonna use that to calculate kind of how long it's going to take you to do all of this once you've read through those two books you should be able to go away and build websites for yourself now you won't be able to build websites that have a kind of CMS capability like WordPress offers but you will be able to build static websites so go away once you've read those two books you'll build a bunch of examples actually reading the books anyway but once you finish build a couple of projects either for friends or family or something for yourself next I would recommend you learn Twitter bootstrap now bootstrap is it's not entirely necessary that you know it but you are going to come across bootstrap as you're working with WordPress themes as you're building websites it's handy to know it's not an actual programming language it's just a CSS framework and it's really small it's a tiny little framework that sits kind of on top of CSS and you can literally learn it in a weekend okay so that's why I mention it and I recommend you you learn this right after the HTML and CSS just because it's gonna take you a couple of days you're gonna come across it throughout your career as a web developer so you might as well learn it why should you've learnt CSS and you can also integrate it straight into the projects that you've just built I would recommend jump start bootstrap by syed fazal raman it's $20 150 pages long and by the end of that you'll fully understand bootstrap like I said guys all of these links for these books are going to be in the description below so you can click down there to check them out after you understand HTML CSS bit of jQuery and bootstrap you can build pretty solid state websites right so before we get into WordPress I think it's quite important that you understand the basics of PHP so WordPress is built on top of PHP and PHP is a server-side programming language PHP also works with MySQL we is that a database and WordPress saves the information you put into WordPress into a database what PHP then serves that that they are up so before you dive into WordPress and really learning how to build themes of WordPress how in to build plugins of WordPress it's important you understand just the basics of PHP so I would recommend PHP and MySQL development a beginner's guide by Mari Matthews and this is a really good book that I read it's $30 and it's 592 pages once you've read this book and you understand the basics of PHP before you even move on to WordPress you should be able to then use PHP in the websites that you've previously built with the other books I recommend it so as you progress throughout these across these books you should be able to keep building upon on the knowledge as you go write an alternative to that book which is a Amazon bestseller which I have read but only about half of it is learning PHP my SQL and JavaScript so again you learn more JavaScript with this book by robbing Nixon again it's $30 and it's a little bit bigger it's eight hundred and twelve pages so choices are - they're whichever book I mean read the reviews whatever book take it takes your fancy but that's that's kind of like your beginner's PHP and it's kind of the foundation before you start building stuff in WordPress next I would recommend either a beginners wordpress book or a wordpress course because really you only want to learn the basics up until now you've probably not touched WordPress we've just been talking about learning the basics of the front-end of development so WordPress if you've never used it before you're going to need to kind of figure out how it works so the book I would recommend is WordPress for beginners by Andy Williams it's twelve dollars and is 220 pages like I say that you could take a course to learn how WordPress works this book will kind of just teach you how to interact with the application how to add posts to a blog how to add pages how the basic framework of WordPress works it's not a book on development that's - so to speak B you're going to need to know how WordPress works before you can start developing for it right once you know how WordPress works you can then move on to theme development so up until this point we we've got a basic understanding of HTML CSS JavaScript and the basics of PHP and that's all you're going to need in order to be able to build WordPress themes so the book hold recommend for WordPress theme development is professional WordPress design and development by Brad Williams it's kind of like the theme development Bible you could say it's like the number one book and has been like forever I think that's like the fourth or fifth edition now it's $30 and it's five hundred and four pages long and this will kind of teach you how to build themes for WordPress and like I say if you've got basic understanding of PHP you know how WordPress works and you can do a bit of front-end then once you've read this book you should be able to build themes for WordPress at this point you can pretty much be taking on clients once you know theme development you can be freelancing online you can be picking up clients and be doing basic web builds for them it's important that you understand theme development and read that book before you start taking on clients because even when you're installing kind of premium or free themes for WordPress there's they always break there's always problems client leads clients need modifications to their themes and stuff like that so I support the understand theme development but right now you could probably get a job as a wordpress front-end developer or like I say you could go out and you could start freelancing and picking up clients or working online or whatever you want to do so we we understand HTML CSS you can build out themes you can build out all the front-end visuals out of a WordPress website so next you're going to kind of we're going to talk about transition it's kind of being a back-end developer and this really is just heavy focus on PHP so this is the second book that I would recommend is for intermediate PHP and it's PHP objects patterns and practice why I'm at as an Stroh and again this is this in this fifth edition it's it's $45 576 pages and this is just a fantastic book for intermediate PHP and it's going to teach you all about object-oriented programming and really show you how you can extend PHP so you could extend your themes and this is going to kinda set you up also for plug-in development with WordPress as well finally the final book that I would recommend is plug-in development for WordPress so professional WordPress plug-in development by Brad Williams now this is for $30 five hundred and four pages and once you have a intermediate to advanced understanding of PHP and you understand plug-in development there's really no limits to what you can do with a wordpress website so what plugins are for WordPress is kind of extra functionality modular code that kind of plugs onto the side of WordPress and that's kind of how WordPress has been built into what it is today so WordPress started off is a very small kind of blogging platform where people could just write articles and it's through PHP developers and plug-in developers that built all of this different functionality and bolted it on that's created this huge ecosystem that is WordPress so for example if you're building a recruitment website there are plugins for managing job listings and things like that if you're building a directory website there are plugins for managing directory listings there's so many different plugins there's tens of thousands of plugins - already exist but if you want to become a true full stack WordPress developer then you need to have an intermediate to advanced understanding of PHP and you need to know how to build plugins yourself so that you can either go in and modify existing plugins or so that you can build plugins from scratch that contain the full functionality of what your clients are looking to achieve with their website and going back to the beginning of the video where I said WordPress is a framework this is what I really mean so once you once you have the ability to build plugins to customize themes you can really just install WordPress website and just build layers on top of it to create almost like a very advanced web application so those are the basics guys that is what I would recommend you learn so I'd go through those books how many books as I suggest one two three four five six seven eight if you include the first the first recommendation was to book so you've got eight books there and two courses if you can do those eight books and two courses and you can understand all of the content inside of those books like said if you don't understand it you you might get most people might be like one chapter or one module you don't understand go on Google keep reading until you do understand it understand those books from front to back eight books to courses and you you'll have the basic foundations of a full stack developer now there are other things you could learn on top of that so with PHP you can just keep digging deeper and deeper and deeper and you can become a better and more skilled PHP developer that's an obvious you can learn advanced PHP I would actually recommend a book by Lorna Mitchell called PHP web services and this is PHP api's so like I say it's not essential but it's something you might want to learn afterwards api's are basically application programming interfaces and they enable you to consume data from other websites so pretty much like if you want to if you go on to like for example a sky scanner like a price comparison website that's using a lot of API so it skin is pulling data from like Virgie and it's pulling data from british airways it's comparing their data and then giving you the cheapest rate that's done through using AP is you could also learn about git and version control now there's a book called pro get by scott check on it's 42 dollars four hundred and fifty six pages long you could learn get from that book or you could learn get through youtube tutorials like free youtube tutorials get is basically a place to store your code and it's version control so whilst you're building WordPress websites you're gonna need to have a workflow so you're going to be pushing these websites to a development server you're going to be pushing them to a live server you're gonna be working on your local machine get is kind of a way way of controlling all that one final thing you might wanna learn is sass sews a stands for syntax syntactically awesome style sheets and sass pretty much just improves your your CSS and makes easier to write CSS and makes it a lot cleaner and more structured to learn settled actually recommend a free youtube series by level up tarts and again I'll put a link in the description below along with the links to all the other resources that I've recommended now you don't have to know get you don't have to know sass you don't have to know PHP API is to be a full-stack WordPress they have but this is some stuff you might just want to learn after you've kind of learned the basics again so so going back to the question that I keep getting asked Brett how do I become a web developer and how long is it going to take that's how you become a web developer you learn that material that I just recommended how long it's going to take you really depends on you as an individual okay so for me I'm a really really slow reader I suck at reading I read really slowly and I read literally about 30 pages in an hour now one thing to remember reading a book on learning to code and programming is not the same as picking up Lord of the Rings book and kind of diving into a novel okay like when you're reading the programming books you're learning something new you have to really understand it in depth and you want to read it very slowly so you could completely understand exactly what you're reading so let's just say in my case reading thirty pages an hour there's a total of three thousand seven hundred pages in those resources that I recommended that would take me a total including that the time spent on the tutorials a total of 123 hours now what I like to do as well is to take the amount of time it takes me to read those books and then double it because inside these books you're going to be building as you go so as you read through the book you're gonna have to read it by the computer right and you're gonna be reading examples implementing reading implementing as you go so I like to take my total read time and kind of double it 123 hours times to 246 hours total to learn how to become a full stack WordPress dev if I study two hours a day five days a week it will take me a total of 26 weeks including those tutorials so you're looking at six months which really is not bad you're probably going to read a lot faster than me now and and some people will understand it quicker some people understand it's slower but like I say just time yourself see how long it takes you to go through that first book and then you can kind of forecast how long it's going to take you to to do the the other seven right so that's kind of my attempt at answering how long it's going to take because like I say everybody's different it's almost an impossible question to answer but hopefully this will give you some perspective I mean even if it took you double that you're looking at a year okay so here's not a long time to be able to get all of that knowledge to start a new career that could earn you 50 to 70 grand up upwards in a job or to be able to be location independent and then that kind of money and live wherever you want six months is two hours a day after work or in the morning wake up two hours earlier that's really not a bad deal at all if you ask me so wonderful thing I do want to record want to suggest throughout this video I've recommended books now I would recommend you buy the physical copies of the books if you've never read programming books before trying to read programming books on a Kindle is a absolute pain okay so you're gonna need to flip back and forth throughout the book and just when I moved over to Chiang Mai Thailand it's really hard to get the hard copies of the books they're a lot more expensive so I started buying them on Kindle and it's just I just paid extra money and get the actual books because it is a pain in the arse to try and read programming books on a Kindle so if you're going to be ordering these you want to be ordering the the hard copy a little bit like this one they're nice and big that's a book on Rails but that's what you want you don't wanna be reading on a Kindle before I wrap this video up might want to mention some additional resources that I would recommend that you stay up-to-date with as you finish this material so the first thing to keep in load up to date is blogs and I would recommend you consume blogs of an RSS feed so if you don't know what feedly is or what RSS is basically feedly is a web application it's free and you can use it to subscribe to blogs so as you find blogs with good articles good content on PHP HTML whatever you can use feedly to subscribe to those blogs then you can go and you can see all of those articles in one place so it's a really good practice to get into perhaps waking up an hour and spending an hour every day going through the articles I've been pulled in by feedly that have come from all your programming blogs that you follow and just maybe reading through a few articles just to keep your knowledge up-to-date and that kind of thing another good website is cite point calm cite point is kind of like a website with tutorials for different programming languages but they have some really good WordPress and PHP stuff that you kind of don't really find in other places so SitePoint comm is really good if you want to brush up on your skills if you want to learn new stuff I mean of course if you want to learn the particular thing you can just google it and find a website that has tutorial it will teach you but if you're stuck for ideas and you like sometimes you get in that place where you want to build something but you're not sure what to build go over to Site point and try out some of their WordPress tutorials because they're really good as well and like I say finally guys just just build stuff as you go forward as you work on more and more client projects as you build more and more plugins as you build more and more themes you'll just become better and better there'll be obstacles you'll need to overcome there'll be challenges there'll be things your clients want you to build you've never built before you have to go out on Google and research and that's how you build your knowledge okay so to become an expert just takes years and years and years with this basic foundation if you can if you read these books you'll you will be at good level to be able to understand everything that's kind of coming your way and just as you overcome challenges your knowledge will increase over time and the more you practice the better you'll become at being a developer finally to wrap it up one thing I do want to say is don't quit too early okay so if you guys are getting into this if you sit down and you read a book and you read the first chapter or two and you think it's difficult don't quit persevere with it if you if you think you don't like reading if you think you don't like programming persevere with it because once you really dig into it you might learn things about yourself that you didn't know that we're in you right so you can't really for example say that you don't like holding if you don't actually understand how coding works okay and then once you've consumed the information and you understand how it works then you might say wow I really really like this I didn't I didn't think I liked it before but actually the stuff I can build the power it gives me to create websites to create online businesses it's absolutely amazing and it'll make you feel good plus you can a living out of it so don't give up too easy guys perseverance and sometimes it's really really hard sometimes you just you've got a book and you just don't understand something and you just it just sucks and that's what it's all about right it's just about grinding and that's why I say two hours every day if you can't do two hours every day they do long weekends but also try and get a day in the week you don't have a big five-day gap because your knowledge will kind of fizzle out but just persevere with the guys and like I said I promise you if you if you if you consume this information in six months you will be able to get a job as a full-stack WordPress developer and you'll understand both front-end and back-end code that you need to know to build WordPress plugins themes and just really powerful web applications hope you liked the video guys it was a bit of a long one but like I said I hope it answers that question I keep getting the question over and over again Brett I want to become a web developer what should I do and how long is it gonna take so your answer is here in this video if you like the video give it a thumbs up don't forget to subscribe like I've said all the links are in the descriptions and I'm also going to put this over on my website Brett Dave comm so you'll be able to review all of these recommendations and all of these steps inside of a blog post on my website as well until next time guys this is Brett from Brett dev calm and we're out peace

Channel: Brett Dev

Views: 61,320

Rating: 4.9191399 out of 5

Keywords: how to become a web developer, how to become a web developer 2017, how to become a web developer 2018, how to become a web developer without a degree, how to become a web developer from scratch, web development for beginners, web development, wordpress developer, full stack wordpress developer, php, developer, programmer, html css, html, css, javascript, wordpress, wordpress career, learn to code, learn how to code, learn web design, learn web development, self taught web developer

Id: AoZ_b54lGfI

Length: 30min 53sec (1853 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 18 2017