I've mentioned previously that I've been using my spare time to learn some new skills following being made redundant. I've worked with software development teams for the last 4 years of my career, but have never done any form of development myself. I thought it about time to dip my toe in the development world.
Source
I decided to start with HTML and what a can of worms that has opened!
I managed to get my head around the basics of HTML fairly quickly ... well I've plenty of time on my hands. That fairly instantly led to delving into CSS which I now have a basic grasp of and now I'm heading down the rather bumpy road of JavaScript and PHP. I'm sure it's a smooth road for some but my brain is getting frazzled!
I've been mostly learning through CodeCademy as I really like their interface. The screen is split into three where the left column provides content to learn or some instructions, the middle column is an editor and the right column shows you the result when you "run" your code. It also provides some tests. However, the pace is fairly quick so I've also been using Pluralsight to backup my learnings. Pluralsight is more presentation based; think classroom learning. I used Pluralsight courses to learn some Linux skills a few months back.
I've found YouTube to also be a useful resource to fill in some gaps. I've found there are many resources for learning individual languages but they all seem to miss out something which I think is rather fundamental. That is how all these things bolt together? What are their uses? That's probably not so true for HTML and CSS as there was some cross referencing between courses but JavaScript and PHP was much less clear to me.
I've ended up ordering a book which walks you through a project using all 4 languages to get the what and why clear in my head. I think it'll be sometime before I can call myself a web developer!
I'll maybe start a little series as I work it all out.