The Ultimate Web Developer Roadmap For 2024

learning web development is incredibly difficult first of all you need to learn multiple programming languages then you need to learn how to think like a developer and only then can you actually start creating websites on top of that you also need to fight all the misinformation out there and figuring out what to learn and when to learn it there's a million different people out there and a million different videos all telling you to learn different things in different orders don't learn this do learn this and all of that information is constantly contradicting each other so in this video I'm going to give you my definitive guide on it exactly how I would go about learning web development from scratch and this is going to be covering front end backend and full stack web development as well as everything in between so I can really give you the definitive guide on exactly what you should learn and what order you should learn it in welcome back to web def simplified my name is Kyle and my job is to simplify the web for you and to do that I actually created two road maps one for the back end and one for the front end that you can download using the link in the description below and this is a road map that that goes through exactly what you need to learn to learn both front-end and backend development and most importantly as you can see I have absolutely tons of links in here to videos articles and so on for all the different topics and projects that you need to learn there's over 200 videos linked and over 50 articles Linked In this road map so if this is something that you're interested in checking out and I would highly recommend it if you enjoy the content in this video it's going to be linked down in the description below and you can download both of these files I have both a light and a dark mode available now let's jump straight into actually figuring out what we need to learn and the first thing you need to understand is that web development is generally broken down into two sections there's front-end web development and backend web development and then there's the idea of full stack which just combines together these two concepts now front-end web development generally deals with the things that you interact with and see as a user so if you're on YouTube right now watching this video all the different things you interact with and all the things that you visually see on the site are represented by the front-end developer a backend developer is the one that hooks everything up behind the scenes for example a lot of the data is stored in databases there's a lot of video data that's stored inside of YouTube and the backend developer is just making sure that all that data is stored properly and making sure that that data gets processed down to the actual client the person that's viewing the video you in this case so it just making sure that that data flow works properly and all the logic and security is in place now as web development has moved further and further into the future and into the current times we've noticed that this line between front end and backend developers has started to blur a lot with the introduction of certain Frameworks like nextjs which if that confuses you don't worry I'll be talking about it during this video but the whole idea here is that you really have a hard time being just a front-end developer or just a backend developer and you really need to learn a little bit of both in order to excel just because there's so many things that are shared between the two of them so that's why I'm going to be covering both front-end and backend development as well as what a more full stack developer is going to look like now in the realm of front-end web development what you really need to know to get started is going to be HTML that's going going to be the very first thing you start with and luckily this is actually a really easy thing to learn for the most part if you just put a little bit of time into learning HTML you can pretty much get to the point where you can write out any HTML you want within a couple days or maybe even a week of practice and that's just spending a little bit of time here and there maybe 30 minutes to an hour each day that's going to give you more than enough time to actually get a really good grasp of HTML and honestly even that first day of 30 minutes to 60 Minutes is going to be enough for you to start to really understand HTML it's a rather small concept to learn and that's why as you'll notice in the cheat sheet that I have it's a rather small section there as well now the next thing you need to learn from there is going to be CSS technically CSS I would say is an optional thing to learn when you're first getting started you can skip it if you want and move directly into JavaScript but learning CSS first is just going to make it a much more enjoyable experience for you now CSS is just how the web is styled so every single thing that you see on the web for the spacing colors font sizes font style all of that is managed by CSS so if you want to make a site that doesn't look completely ugly you're going to need to make sure you understand CSS and this can be as complicated or as simple as you want it to be the Bare Bones of CSS is really not that complicated learning things like Flex box grid how the different position properties Works display padding margin the Box model all of these things that I cover inside of that road map those are really not that complicated of topics but if you want to take it to the next level you can get rather Advanced with certain things like container query media queries animations pseudo elements pseudo classes and so much more so the nice thing about this is you can start off learning just the bare bones of CSS really just Flex box grid and a few other different things and then as you want to learn more and more you can start adding in that complexity as you go but you don't have to learn it all at once just get down those bare bone basics of how to make things look good how to position them in the right place and how to change their colors that's really all you're going to need to know now the next thing you need to learn as a front-end developer and this is also something you most like likely want to learn as a backend developer as well is Javascript now this is going to be by far the most complicated thing that you learn up to this point because JavaScript is a rather large programming language there's a lot of things that you can do in it and it could be quite complicated because it's been around for so long so there's a lot of older things as well as newer things that you need to learn about JavaScript now the key with JavaScript is to make sure you take it piece by piece and then try to work on integrating those pieces together the analogy that I really like to give is that if you're learning to try to speak Spanish for example and you only know how to speak English you'll probably get started by learning some vocabulary you'll learn certain words for like book and library and so on but if all you ever did was spend time learning vocabulary you would never actually learn to speak or read Spanish because you never learned how to connect that vocabulary together into sentences how do you conjugate verbs and so on that's the same thing with JavaScript you can spend all the time you want learning all the fancy features of JavaScript like how to create variables how to if statements work Loops promises async await arrays object objects but if you never learn how to combine those different concepts together you're never actually going to truly learn how to write and program inside of JavaScript this is why I actually wrote a JavaScript course I called it JavaScript simplified I'll link it in the description if you want to check it out but it really focuses on how do you actually combine these Concepts together and the real key here is to work on projects of varying difficulties that ramp up as you go so get started writing really simple projects at the beginning and slowly build and add on more and more complex projects in that road map that I have Linked In the description I actually have projects categorized from easy all the way to hard as well as all the concepts you need to learn from start to finish so you can really go through that process and figure out exactly what you need to learn and then go through the projects in order of easy too hard to really start to connect those Concepts together now if it was 6 Seven 8 years ago that would be all you would need to know to actually land a job as a front-end web developer and that's all I knew when I landed my very first job but now things have changed quite a bit with the introduction of front-end Frameworks and they have massively increased in popular popularity compared to 5 6 7 years ago so you're going to need to learn some type of front-end framework in order to land a job as a front-end developer now in the road map I have quite a few mentioned some of the more popular ones are going to be react Astro view spelt and angular but in my opinion I would recommend learning react the reason for this is that react is the most popular one and there are the most amount of jobs out there for react so if you're looking to land a job as a front-end web developer react is going to be the best bet for you because there's the most amount of resources and there's the most amount of jobs is willing to hire react developers now the key with learning react is that you make sure you don't jump into it too early so many developers learn the absolute Bare Bones of JavaScript and then jump into react that is not at all what you want to do you want to make sure you have a strong understanding of even intermediate level JavaScript Concepts before you start jumping into the complexities of react because if you don't understand JavaScript at a rather strong level react is going to make it so much harder for you to write things because you just don't understand the JavaScript that goes goes into react so first make sure you really understand JavaScript before you start to learn react and if you try to jump in too early and you notice react is really difficult for you most likely it's because you're missing some of those core JavaScript skills the next key thing you need to understand about react is the idea of declarative versus imperative code normally in JavaScript your code is imperative but react kind of flips the model to be a more declarative approach and really the differences is that imperative code tells you step-by-step what to do step one do this step two do this step three do this and so on while declarative code essentially says this is what I want my thing to look like based on whatever my state is so instead of being a step-by-step guide it just says here is what this thing is now that sounds probably quite confusing right now but once you start writing code in JavaScript and in react it'll start to make a lot of sense what I'm talking about and understanding the difference between the two is really going to help you excel at writing good react code again I have a full course on react I'll link it down in the description for you this is an absolutely massive course that really helps you with figuring out that declarative versus imperative thinking and I also have a course on CSS I didn't mention it earlier but I'll also link that in the description for you now once you figured out your front-end framework of choice the next thing to do is to learn what's called a meta framework and a meta framework is just a framework that is built on top of an existing front end framework so in the case of react the most popular one right now is going to be nextjs there's also remix though if you wanted and maybe if you're doing spelt there's spelt kit view has n and so on each of these has their own pairing or maybe even multiple options I have all of these inside the RO map that's Linked In the description for you but the nice thing about this section is at this time right now it's more of an optional thing than a required things most jobs that are looking for a react developer don't really care if you know nextjs or not obviously if you know it and they use it it'll be nice and it'll be a bonus for you but most people don't need you to know nextjs in order to land a job so right now this is something that I would consider optional but I would highly recommend learning it just because it'll make your actual application that much stronger so in the case of learning react you're going to want to go into nextjs and currently nextjs has got an app router way of doing things and a Pages router way of doing things if this confuses you don't worry you'll figure it out once you get to nextjs but I would recommend actually learning both different ways of doing things and that's because the app router way is so new that most companies are still using the old Pages directory so by knowing both of these different concepts and how they work together and how they work separately it'll make it so that if you actually go and apply for xjs job it won't matter if they're on the newer technology or the older technology you'll be able to actually show them that you can work in both of those different scenarios now as part of my reactjs course I actually have a full nextjs course that covers both the app router as well as the Pages directory so if this is the route that you want to go I highly recommend getting both my combination of react and the xjs course and that's in my react simplified premium package again it'll all be linked in the description below now the final thing that I recommend that you learn in the front end path is going going to be typescript and the nice thing about typescript is you can kind of slot it in wherever you want I generally would recommend that you learn typescript after you start to learn JavaScript but you don't need to wait until you've mastered JavaScript you really only need to know the basics of JavaScript in order to actually learn typescript and that's because typescript is built on top of JavaScript hence the names are quite similar and all typescript does is it adds types to JavaScript because JavaScript is an untyped language which means when you try to refactor your code it can be difficult since you don't have anything called type safety helping you know what parts of your code are changing when you're making your certain changes so typescript is something that most companies have swapped over to using from JavaScript because it makes writing larger scale applications much easier so if you want to really land a job especially going forward into 2025 2026 and so on typescript is going to be a must know because more and more companies are moving to it but luckily typescript is a rather small thing to learn compared to JavaScript react and nextjs so it's really not going to take you nearly as long for example my entire typescript course which teaches you everything you need to know about typescript is only about 5 hours long and that teaches you absolutely everything that you need to know and again I'll link that course in the description for you if you want to check it out the one caveat I'll give you about typescript is I would really only focus on learning the more basic features of typescript you do not need to learn Advanced typescript features in order to write typescript code really that's going to be more so for very Advanced and Niche use cases and 99% of developers working Real World jobs only use the very basic features of typescript so when you go to actually learn typescript focus on the more basic to intermediate level features and ignore all of the more advanced and Niche level features cuz you really don't need them now on top of learning all these different things for front end I know it's a lot but I would actually sprinkle in a few additional things first of all I would learn some type of Version Control git is going to be the most common and most popular so I'd recommend learning that also I'd recommend learning what Json is which is pretty much something you have to learn in order to learn JavaScript and then I would also maybe spend a little bit of time focusing on security and testing just figure out how people can try to break your applications maliciously so you can write secure applications that they cannot break as well as writing simple tests that actually make sure that your application works because in more real world projects security and testing are some of the most important things in them now if you spend the time to learn all of this I guarantee you that you'll be able to land a job with those skills as long as you have a decent resume and portfolio because that's really everything that employer could actually possibly want out of a junior developer now when it comes to the backend side of things a lot of the stuff we're going to be learning is rather similar for example first of all we can completely skip HTML and CSS because those are only used on the front end they're not used on the back end at all when it comes to the back end you can actually choose between multiple different languages so you could choose JavaScript if you want and if you're going to be learning front-end web development I would recommend using JavaScript for the back end as well just because you only need to learn one language that way but there's other options you could use you could use PHP you could use go you could use rust C Ruby it really depends what you want to do but again I would recommend going with JavaScript if you're also planning on working on the front end now from there you need to choose a web framework similar to how you choose react or angular or view for your front end you also need to have a framework for your backend and when it comes to JavaScript the most popular framework is going to be Express so I would recommend Learning Express with JavaScript and this is going to be inside of something called node.js node.js is just how you operate and run JavaScript on an actual backend of server so when I say nodejs I really just mean backend JavaScript and express is the framework that allows you to create a web server for your actual application to work on so that's the thing you're going to need to learn and the nice thing is is if you already learned all the front-end stuff and you've learned JavaScript you've pretty much learned 90% of what you need to know all you need to do is add in a few extra nuggets and knowledge for node.js as well as for Express but those concept ceps are so small in comparison to the entirety of JavaScript as a language that it's really not going to be that big of a leap for you and I actually have an overall no JS course it's completely free I'll have a Linked In the description for you it's on YouTube and it's also going to be in that road map and that road map also includes a ton of different projects for you to be able to practice all of these backend Concepts now once you've learned your language of choice as well as your framework of choice the next thing you're going to want to figure out is a database now you don't need to be an expert in databases there are full-time engineering roles specifically for database engineers and database Specialists but as a backend developer you need to have at least a passing knowledge of how a database works as well as how you can query data from it and there's going to be two different types of databases there are SQL databases and there are no SQL databases I personally recommend using a SQL database as I find more companies especially larger scale companies use SQL databases and I find that they just work a little bit better for most applications but you can really choose whichever one you want because they share quite a few things in how they work obviously the implementation is quite a bit different but the overall knowledge you gain from working with one or the other is relatively overlapping between the two so if you have no SQL experience but the job is looking for SQL experience that's going to be mostly okay now the really great thing is that's kind of all the unique stuff that you need to learn as a backend developer because a lot of the other stuff is shared with the front end for example if you decided to use JavaScript for your backend language learning typescript would obviously be the next great step and the typescript that you learn on the front end is exactly the same as on the back end so you don't need to learn anything new if you're going from front end to back end same thing if you want to use a meta framework like nextjs as I said the line between front end and backend developer is really starting to get blurred and that's because of all of these different meta Frameworks because these meta Frameworks act as both a backend and a front end at the exact same time so you have one developer that's writing code both for the back end and for the front end at the exact same time so as a backend developer I would recommend looking into these different meta Frameworks now if you're going to be a purely back-end developer with no front end at all you don't really need to know these meta Frameworks that well so that's why I recommend this as an optional thing to learn but going and spending the time to learn something like nextjs is really going to help push you to the next level because now you have both backend skills as well as some front-end skills that you can learn because you've learned both nextjs as well as the more backend Focus skills and then just like with front end some of the other things like Version Control Json security testing and all of that you should also learn when it comes to backend some of the things you may learn will be different for example Security on the back end is quite a bit different than Security on the front end but otherwise they're very similar between the two now I know all of this information can be quite overwhelming and even just looking at the road map can be incredibly overwhelming because there are hundreds of different topics and projects and videos on these road maps but what I really want you to do is just take a deep breath and really understand that this is not a quick process it's going to take a significant amount of time to actually learn all these different skills and don't be surprised if it takes you over a year just to learn all these different concepts and then you had to build up a resume and a portfolio and start applying for jobs so this can be a very lengthy process but just know that where you are now versus where you are a year or two from now when you actually learn these Concepts you're going to be a completely different person and you're going to look back on who you were a few years ago and be so happy that you stuck it through and put in all of the extra work and effort to get to where you are now because having a job as a web developer is incredible inedibly rewarding enjoyable and is an absolutely great career for both financial and work life balance so if you're interested in taking this seriously don't forget to download the Rob Map it's completely free I'll have it linked in the description for you and with that said thank you very much for watching and have a good day

Channel: Web Dev Simplified

Views: 198,778

Keywords: webdevsimplified, 2024 web dev roadmap, web dev roadmap, 2025 web dev roadmap, web development roadmap, web development guide, 2024 web dev guide, 2024 web development guide, 2025 web dev guide, 2024 full stack web dev guide, 2024 full stack roadmap, full stack roadmap, full stack web dev roadmap, web developer guide

Id: Gc4Xh8u19NU

Length: 18min 44sec (1124 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 16 2024