Learning HTML!

[tobyrice01]

I am using http://www.codecademy.com to teach me how to use HTML and CSS. Try it! I've gotten better already.

[StartVM]

I am using http://www.codecademy.com to teach me how to use HTML and CSS. Try it! I've gotten better already.

While CodeAcademy is a decent free introduction for beginners, I tend to steer people clear from it as when I used it a while back when I was first beginning my career in web development, I felt it gave me a false sense of my knowledge. It leaves HUGE gaps unfilled, and you earn badges that allow you to think you have made a lot of substantial progress when really you are just scratching the surface. For people more serious in web development, in my opinion it is invaluable to get a real-world education or course. Its funny you post this tonight, earlier today I wrote an article on Facebook regarding how I learned web development and how I suggest others get into it. Below is the article.

I get asked this question on a weekly basis, "How do I learn to code?" Because the web field is so broad, there is no simple answer to this question. First you have to decide what you plan to do with you skills. Do you want to design a personal website? Or maybe a blog, or a software to manage your employees. Regardless of the interest, I strongly reccommend you learn the basics of HTML and CSS. Both of these languages will pop up during your coding career regardless what area, and its important to understand the basic syntax.

How you learn is specific to who is learning, but NOTHING replaces learning in real-time with an instructor. This may be through higher education, a course you take at a community college, or a coding group like CodingDojo. It is simply easier to be with other like minded people to answer specific questions when they come up.

I did not have a role model when I was learning to code and I picked up really bad habits. In the past 3 months I have had to teach myself HTML and CSS all over again, because I skipped so many essential parts because I learned by going through google and youtube for everything. BAD IDEA.mBy doing this you will have far more gaps in your knowledge and younwill quickly become frusterated. I reccommend Rob Percival's Complete Web Developer Course available on UDEMY as a general overview of HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, API, JQUERY. I did find it a tad misleading as he said you can go out and be a web developer after the course. If you want to be any developer of ethics, I highly do not reccomend this. There are still too many gaps in your knowledge that you need to know. For one, you don't get a strong enough foundation of how to properly use plugins to build responsive websites, and to build a simple dropdown bar.

The course is also normally $199, however it does come with a year of web hosting and a 30 day money back guarantee for any reason. Is it worth your time to check out? Yeah, but I personally don't think its worth $199 for the low amount of detail discussed on each concept.

To wrap this extravagent post up, don't rely on one source to gain your knowledge and also don't hop around between languages. There is too much to learn, and you need to cover the basics before expanding with different fields.

[tobyrice01]

Interesting concept.

[alblua]

My method is to read the massive books of coding. Within one week, I was able to code with referencing the book knowing what I can do, and a while later, I'm quite fluent in HTML, as in a second language.

Of course, the big books are very old school and seem tiring, but they are very nice sources. w3schools provides a nice layout of teaching in which I use to base off my lessons in which I teach students at a school to code.

Give it a try, both are very nice. Sometimes even reading through coding forums and finding out what errors others have actually teach you something, as have I. There is no standard in how to become a great coder.