How to Learn Web Development
Take your web dev skills to the next level with these external resources
Let’s be real: building web pages can be confusing and frustrating at times, especially when you are getting the hang of it. Hot Page is a great way to get started because it takes care of a lot of the annoying details for you.
However, part Hot Page’s guiding philosophy is that we don’t oversimplify things. We give you the power to build any page imaginable, and we never hide the code from you. The trade-off is that you have to take a little more responsibility for making your pages. To really use Hot Page, you have to understand the basic outlines of HTML and CSS. Once you’ve got that, Hot Page will make it easier to focus on your work, and learn new things one by one, as needed. Below are some tips for looking things up quickly, and digging into the code more productively.
Some Tips for Quickly Learning More
The Mozilla Developer’s Network (MDN) has the best and most up-to-date documentation on web technologies like HTML, CSS, JavaScript and even little-used things like WebGL or WebAssembly. The information is published by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation (the makers of the Firefox browser). Anyone can suggest changes to these pages, making them generally the most complete source of information on any given topic.
Often, if you use Google to search for information, the first result above MDN will be W3Schools. It’s another great source of information and may be more accesible for beginners. However, it is rarely as complete as MDN.
Two publications have been doing a great job explaining the web for years: CSS Tricks and Smashing Magazine. They are both full of tutorials and articles written by some really impressive web developers.
As a beginner, you may want to employ a framework to get started quickly. These are code libraries that can help you get rolling with a variety of pre-built modules like a responsive grid system or pretty buttons. There are trade-offs, however, as we explain in our documentation on frameworks.
One of the coolest features of the web is that you can always read the code that was used to build them. Every browser is a little different, but all of them let you view the raw HTML that was sent to bootstrap your page. Unfortunately, these days web sites are so complicated that this typically looks like gobbledygook that is of little use to us humans.
To get a better handle on what’s actually happening, you can open the developer tools to peak behind the curtain and see the elements that make up the page you’re looking at. You can even start messing with the structure and see what changes: move elements around, add or remove a class, or change CSS properties directly. It’s an absolutely essential tool that you can use to reverse-engineer anything you see on the web.
Lastly, there’s a special tool for learning from pages that were built on Hot Page: you can view any public page on the platform in the Hot Page editor to see exactly how it was constructed. We even made the Hot Bookmarklet to make it easier for you to dive right in.