About This Book

How to Get the Most Out of This Book

Chapter 1: Setup and Tooling

Chapter 2: What is a Web Page?

Chapter 3: Using CSS to add Style

Chapter 4: JavaScript

Chapter 5: Intro to Programming Languages

Chapter 6: Terminal

Chapter 7: Git and Version Control

Chapter 8: Frontend and Backend Web Development

Chapter 9: Field Guide

Changelog

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A Field Guide to Your New Career

How to Become a Web Developer: A Field Guide

The audience for this book is me, five years ago, when I was starting to think about becoming a programmer.  My path to get to where I am now - a Frontend Developer - was inefficient, convoluted, and often directionless.  It was longer and more expensive than it needed to be.

My motivation to write this book is fueled, in part, by spite; I am still irked by the many false starts. I would spend time learning something, only to find out much later it did not get me closer to becoming a Web Developer.  For example, I spent a lot of time learning WordPress - a tool to build websites - before understanding how WordPress fit into Web Development.  At the time, I thought working on WordPress sites was the majority of Web Development - spoiler alert: I was wrong.

Additionally, I spent too much time trying to decipher tutorials written by Web Developers.  Without intending to sound like a snob, professional developers are not the best teachers; especially for beginners.  Not always, but often, advanced professionals have a hard time meeting beginners at their level.  They make assumptions, intentionally or not, that lead to a lot of confusion.  For example, I would read something like, "just SSH into this," and then spend the next couple of hours trying to figure out what SSH meant. Meanwhile, the article was explaining a different topic, but I was down a rabbit hole learning about SSH.

# About This Book

## Preface

The audience for this book is me, five years ago, when I was starting to think about becoming a programmer.  My path to get to where I am now - a Frontend Developer - was inefficient, convoluted, and often directionless.  It was longer and more expensive than it needed to be.

My motivation to write this book is fueled, in part, by spite; I am still irked by the many false starts. I would spend time learning something, only to find out much later it did not get me closer to becoming a Web Developer.  For example, I spent a lot of time learning WordPress - a tool to build websites - before understanding how WordPress fit into Web Development.  At the time, I thought working on WordPress sites was the majority of Web Development - spoiler alert: I was wrong.

Additionally, I spent too much time trying to decipher tutorials written by Web Developers.  Without intending to sound like a snob, professional developers are not the best teachers; especially for beginners.  Not always, but often, advanced professionals have a hard time meeting beginners at their level.  They make assumptions, intentionally or not, that lead to a lot of confusion.  For example, I would read something like, "just SSH into this," and then spend the next couple of hours trying to figure out what SSH meant. Meanwhile, the article was explaining a different topic, but I was down a rabbit hole learning about SSH.