Frustrations as a Self-Taught Beginner

The time you started learning HTML seemed quite easy. It was fun and easy to understand human readable codes. 10 minutes of learning and BOOM! You have created your first webpage. Then what ? You knew you need CSS to style the page and JavaScript to add some functionalities. After some time you realized there are dozens of things you should learn and practice. You started finding the best ones on forums but since everyone has their own opinion and every languages has some pros and cons, you started feeling confused. It became so overwhelming that you could not concentrate developing the core skills you needed.

What Should You Do In This Situation:

- Take a break. Dont look for any tutorial or jump from one technology to another.

- Set a goal. As a web developer, you need 3 things first. HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

- Watch HTML tutorials and practice with plain HTML as much as you can. There are a lot of free tutorials on youtube and w3Schools is also a great choice.

- If you are sufficient with your HTML skill, start with CSS. Then make some projects with plain HTML, CSS and maybe CSS3 features. Make some fictional company website, a portfolio or an image gallery.

- Then start with plain JavaScript. Start with the basics like variables, functions, arrays, loops, objects. After the basics, learn to manipulate the DOM, learn AJAX. Make some projects with plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Make a game where your computer generates a random number and you as a player have to guess it. Or make a calculator.

- Next learn jQuery. You will already be feeling confident with your skills now. At this time, learning jQuery should take no more than 5 hours.

- Try practicing with your skills. Make a website similar to High Tech Web Dev. Or, just make a portfolio website just like mine ones here.

- Congrats! You have become a front end web developer. Now you can learn any framework with confidence like Bootstrap for CSS or React or Angular for JavaScript.

How Much Time Should It Take ?

Set a goal. It may take 3 months. Maybe more. But dont lose hope and dont look for anything else. Develop the skills above and you will be glad.