How To Become a Front-End Web Developer or Engineer in 3 Months | A Roadmap

so you want to be a web developer or a front-end engineer but there's a lot of information out there and it can be overwhelming what to learn how to learn where to learn it well I'm here to tell you that it's completely doable you can do it and I can show you where you need to go and which you need to learn so if that sounds interesting to you follow along before you start learning it's good to set a time table it can be three six or twelve months but it's important to do this so you can keep track of your progress and hold yourself accountable to a particular goal date that you've set before you've even looked at code the only thing that really changes based upon the timetable is the amount of time you're spending per week learning how to code if you're able to dig in and commit 20 to 25 hours a week or more three months is not a very long time but it is absolutely doable and getting the skills that you need to land your first job in the web development scene if you only have a few hours a week to commit to code that's absolutely fine too consistency is key here you just want to make sure that you keep learning every week and you keep putting your eyes on new things that way you can increase the skills that you've already gained and learn new ones and you aren't forgetting anything as you move along also at this early stage it's good to keep in mind that learning code isn't easy you're going to have roadblocks that are going to be things that come up in your life just know that what you're doing right now is worth it and can get you to the place that you really want to be today watching this video knowing that learning code is something you want to do so what are your options for learning web development or front-end engineering well there's the traditional four-year college degree route going to university and studying computer science and hopefully specialising in web development now that route takes a long time and there are a lot of different things that you're going to cover that have absolutely nothing to do with web development JavaScript front-end engineering anything like that but it is an option and if it's something that you've always wanted to do to go to college things like that it's completely valid just takes a while something that's popped up recently in the last few years are the concept of coding boot camps it's how I personally learned how to code and it's how I broke into the industry they're usually 12-week programs 16 week programs 24 week programs they range from full-time to part-time there's online ones now there's in-person and they're really good for setting a structure up so that you know exactly what you're learning exactly the skill set you're going to get and they hold you accountable you have homework you have a teacher you have other students they make sure that you're in class every day they're very good at for that accountability piece but they're also very expensive and a lot of times they ask you to completely quit your job to maintain 40 hours a week at the boot camp or more and sometimes that's just not economically or financially feasible for most people so what this video is really centered around is online self taught learning for web development and front-end engineering it's not the case that to get a job in development you need it for your degree it's not the case that you need to go to some fancy boot camp it's not the case that you need all these fancy certificates you can do it all online and you can do it for relatively cheap so if you do decide to teach yourself how to code online the biggest thing that you need to make sure that you do is to maintain a sense of accountability the timetable will come in handy here but also set weekly goals understand that when you start a course understand how long it's going to take most courses have their 40 hours long or they're 70 hours long I understand that and put a plan in place that I want to have this done in two weeks I know I can spend you know 20 hours this week in 20 hours the next week to finish this course and hold yourself to those the quickest way to fail at learning code online is to let it go by the wayside take a week off and never actually get back to it now we need to talk about what to learn where to start and where to learn those things all right so to go over these technologies I'm going to break them down into three categories they're the have twos these are the technologies that you have to have to get the most junior role in web development or front-end engineering then there are the nice-to-haves these are what I consider the probably going to be on the Job Description they would be really nice for you to know you're probably going to need them for most roles especially if you plan on applying to things that may not be a technically junior role but you still want to see if you can get your foot in the door and then there are the cherries on top which are things that are going to be really nice to have they'll kind of be the crown jewel on your resume if you know about them the Hat sues you probably already know it's HTML CSS and JavaScript you're going to need to have a solid fundamental base of all three of these to be able to land any kind of job in web development I have a video that goes over these technologies a little bit more in depth if you want to check it out I will link it up above but just as a brief overview hTML is the structure and the of a website CSS is what's used to make that content pretty and javascript is used to interact with the website from the users in these will be the first three things that you need to learn on your journey to becoming a web developer from an engineer alright so moving on to the nice to have these are things that are definitely going to beef up your resume so we did have an understanding of a CSS preprocessor like sass or less by that same token it would also be good to know a CSS library like bootstrap or foundation those are the two big players in that realm have you done understanding of version control with git and github are also really important in this tier of skills and then the last one I have labeled as a nice-to-have which some people may disagree with is jQuery the reason I have jQuery has a nice-to-have and not in a central part of being a web developer or a front-end engineer is because anything you can do in jQuery you can do in JavaScript if you're a vanilla JavaScript of rock star then you can pick up jQuery really quickly but if you just hop on the jQuery train too early you lose out on some fundamental skills in JavaScript that are really helpful especially once you start diving into JavaScript frameworks and things like that and so finally let this below and so finally that leaves us with the cherries on top now these are things that are going to separate you from the pack when it comes to the junior web development jobs the things that show commitment and time spent learning this stuff first is an understanding of a popular JavaScript framework my suggestion on which one to learn would be take a look at your local job market and see if they enjoy angular or react or view or ember there's a thousand of them and there's one popping up every five seconds take a look at where the jobs are in your area and learn that the next skill is learning the bleeding edge technologies of JavaScript so this is es6 and beyond all of this new fancy stuff that I thrown into JavaScript to make it that much more awesome if you can show an understanding of that future employers will be really impressed the next set of tools are common front-end developer tools they're not necessary to build every website ever but having a good understanding of at least a couple of these will definitely set you apart things like gulp webpack npm babel are all going to be things that you're going to run into you once you get a job so it's good to at least be familiar with them before you start applying and is having an understanding of a way to deploy a front-end web app something like Heroku or firebase being able to deploy something not only helps you to be able to show it off once you're talking about things you've worked on but it's also really impressive to have something that you've built being a self-taught developer live and up on the web for somebody to interact with so to learn the basics of HTML and CSS you can do that for free through code Academy they do a really good job of teaching you the basics however it's just you and a computer in lines of text so it can get really boring really quickly and I wouldn't necessarily suggest it to learn more advanced things if you move through the HTML and CSS courses really quickly on code Academy feel free to take the JavaScript class for a whirl as well if you leave for something a little bit more in-depth I would recommend team treehouse they have a front-end web developer track and they have a full stack JavaScript developer Trek that both come really highly reviewed really highly rated and are really awesome resources for somebody who's learning just how to get into code past the fundamental web developer course that team treehouse which will give you a good groundwork for HTML CSS and JavaScript they also have courses on every subject that I covered in the previous section from sass to go to react angular all of those things are covered in multiple tutorials on treehouse if you went through the front-end web developer course on team treehouse core if you just don't like their flavor or style i also recommend you to me as a resource for learning web development I think in multiple udemy courses over the past few months to learn different things from react to getting a better understanding of vanilla javascript in their courses are phenomenal one thing to keep in mind about udemy is to do your research read the reviews and make sure that the course lines up with where you are in your development career there's nothing worse than spending 15 20 50 hundred dollars on a course and then finding out it's too advanced or way below your skill level so make sure you do your research before you spend any money there also if you're looking for a free ebook that explains some of the core concepts of JavaScript while also giving challenges there's this ebook called eloquent JavaScript which I highly recommend it's something I read before I started the bootcamp it is completely free and they have a playground on the website that you can go to and you can mess around with all of the coding challenges they have on there so those are all of the recommendations that I have for resources they'll all be linked down below and obviously there are a thousand their websites for learning code West boss makes great tutorials plural site egghead IO and Udacity all do great work in this field as well these are just the ones that I have personally used and I personally can recommend alright so after you pick up the skills that you need to get a job the next question is how do I get that job this is where a lot of really important work comes in and I have a video already about job postings how to read them what you should apply to you and I'll link that up a book but the big thing that you need to focus on now is having a portfolio website that shows projects that you've built a github profile that is cleaned up for people to look at a resume that looks nice in writing cover letters that are going to get the attention of the HR people who you're applying to if you have the opportunity while you're learning how to code or after you've finished up a couple of courses to contribute to open source projects by all means do it that looks great on a portfolio if the reason why you wanted to learn to code in the first place is because you had this awesome idea for an app feel free to build it while you're learning how to code and put that on your portfolio site as well anything that you've made over the last X amount of time that you've been learning how to code that you're proud of is something that you can show employers I'll be doing a follow up video this week about what you should put on your portfolio site and have on your github profile when you're looking for that first job if it's already up I'll link it up above here but that's all I have for this roadmap video and how to get the skills you need to be job ready as a web developer or a front-end engineer if you have any questions by all means feel free to leave them down in the comments or you can email me it's aaron in beta at gmail.com as always if you like this video please feel free to hit that like button because they are super awesome and they make me smile if you like what I'm doing here you want to follow along in my journey please feel free to hit that subscribe button as always thank you guys for your support I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day and I will see you again very soon bye

Channel: Aaron in Beta

Views: 183,275

Rating: 4.9557266 out of 5

Keywords: How to become a web developer, how to become a front end engineer, how to learn javascript, what to learn to become a web developer, what is javascript used for, learn web development, learn how to code, learn how to make a website, learn development, html, css, how to learn web development, how to become a front end web developer, how to get a developer job, javascript, skills for web development, Web developer, developer, webdeveloper

Id: YvfqujPLJn0

Length: 10min 29sec (629 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 11 2017