Web development is also known to people as web programming, and it refers to creating unique web applications. We have a lot of web applications today, and some of them are e-commerce sites just like Amazon or sites for social networking, like Whatsapp, Facebook, and Instagram.
One good news that you will hear today is that a person can easily learn web development.
Many people even claim that it is the best and easiest kind of coding that a beginner can learn. Setting it up is pretty much easy, it will give you quick results, and you can also find a variety of tutorials or training on the internet.
There are so many people who go the extra mile to learn web development/coding just so they could secure a job or create a social media site like Facebook. Getting an introduction to web coding is still a good idea as it can be started up very easily. Whether you just want to get the knowledge of coding or you want to start up a career with it, learning web development is completely yours. In fact, we can say that it is a very smart decision to make.
An overview of web development
Web development has 2 broad divisions, which are client-side development (also called front-end development) and server-side development (also called back-end development).
The first one – client-side development, is the construction of what users will see once they load an application (web application) – the design, how it is interacted with, and also the content. Three codes are needed to do this, and they are JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.
HyperText Markup Language, known as HTML, is a code that is used to ‘mark up’ text so that it will become a nice web page. The whole web pages that you find on the internet are all written or created in HTML. It will also form the strength of a web application. Cascading Style Sheets, known as CSS, is the code used to set the rules of style for the web pages’ appearance. The web’s cosmetic side is being handled by CSS. Lastly, JavaScript is a special language for scripting and is used to make web pages more functional and interactive.
Server-side development is responsible for what happens behind the scenes of web applications. A server-side mostly generates the client-side with the use of a database.
Here is a typical example. Imagine log in to your social media account like Facebook, the news feed of your account will have the latest updates. They will be completely different from the ones you saw on the previous day.
These changes occurred, not because it was manually edited by an employee, but the updates would have been received by the back-end and accordingly regenerate the front-end.
Back-end or server-side scripts are usually written in varieties of coding frameworks and languages, like:
- Ruby on Rails
- Perl
- Python
- PHP
- Node.js
- ASP.NET
- Java
All these are basically what web development entails. Now, let us talk about the best ways that you can begin to learn it.
How can you learn web programming/development?
One of the ways to learn it is by enrolling in a trade school or university. But, the cons of this are that it is costly and schools might not be able to keep up with the fast-evolving web.
Fortunately, the internet has a lot of high-quality web development training. We can say that learning web development from the web is the best.
Teach Yourself
You can still learn by making your own research, checking out the templates of other sites, and studying their source code. The main con about this is that it will take time for you to master it.