Getting started

I got an email recently from a young person looking to get into web development. They wanted to know what languages they should start with, whether they should a Mac or a Windows PC, and what some places to learn from.

I wrote back, saying this about languages:

For web development, start with HTML, then CSS, then JavaScript (and don’t move on to JavaScript too quickly—really get to grips with HTML and CSS first).

And this is what I said about hardware and software:

It doesn’t matter whether you use a Mac or a Windows PC, as long as you’ve got an internet connection, some web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, for example) and a text editor. There are some very good free text editors available for Mac and PC:

• Visual Studio Code
• Atom

For resources, I had a trawl through links I’ve tagged with “learning” and “html” and sent along some links to free online tutorials:

• Codebar tutorials
• HTML+CSS tutorial
• Marksheet, a free HTML and CSS tutorial
• Learn to code HTML and CSS
• Just starting out with CSS and HTML
• Interneting is hard (but it doesn’t have to be)
• Web design in four minutes
• The front-end developer handbook

After sending that email, I figured that this list might be useful to anyone else looking to start out in web development. If you know of anyone in that situation, I hope this list might help.