It’s great that we’ve got so many resources these days for keeping up with the latest and greatest developments in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript …but I think it’s really great that Chris maintains this collection of evergreen tutorials on the basics.
A whoooole bunch of links about inclusive design, gathered together from a presentation.
Chris has set up a whole site dedicated to someone-else’s-server sites with links to resources and services (APIs), along with ideas of what you could build in this way.
Here’s one way to think about it: you can take your front-end skills and do things that typically only a back-end can do. You can write a JavaScript function that you run and receive a response from by hitting a URL. That’s sometimes also called Cloud Functions or Functions as a Service, which are perhaps better names, but just a part of the whole serverless thing.
I love what Ben is doing with this single-serving site (similar to my design principles collection)—it’s a collection of handy links and resources around voice UI:
Designing a voice interface? Here’s a useful list of lists: as many guiding principles as we could find, all in one place. List compiled and edited by Ben Sauer @bensauer.
BONUS ITEM: Have him run a voice workshop for you!
Following on from that intro-level book on JavaScript, here’s a handy list of resources for learning more advanced JavaScript.
I had a really enjoyable time at Codebar Brighton last week, not least because Morty came along.
I particularly enjoy teaching people who have zero previous experience of making a web page. There’s something about explaining HTML and CSS from first principles that appeals to me. I especially love it when people ask lots of questions. “What does this element do?”, “Why do some elements have closing tags and others don’t?”, “Why is it textarea and not input type="textarea"?” The answer usually involves me going down a rabbit-hole of web archeology, so I’m in my happy place.
But there’s only so much time at Codebar each week, so it’s nice to be able to point people to other resources that they can peruse at their leisure. It turns out that’s it’s actually kind of tricky to find resources at that level. There are lots of great articles and tutorials out there for professional web developers—Smashing Magazine, A List Apart, CSS Tricks, etc.—but no so much for complete beginners.
Here are some of the resources I’ve found:
If I find any more handy resources, I’ll link to them and tag them with “learning”.
If you want to keep up to date with all the coolest stuff landing in CSS, I recommend bookmarking this ever-changing page.
This is a very handy resource—a collection of minimum viable implementations of HTML5 features and JavaScript APIs.
The Buckminster Fuller Institute has put together this collection of resources which explain the ideas behind “comprehensive anticipatory design science.”
Seems especially relevant in light of the first issue of the Journal of Design and Science from MIT.
The legacy of the Black Mountain College lives on.
If you’re intrigued by the kind of design sprints I wrote about recently, here’s a handy collection of resources to get you going.
- Pre-sprint
- Understand: Gather existing knowledge, expose assumptions and unknowns
- Diverge: Illuminating all possible paths
- Converge: Choose the right path
- Prototype: Quickly build the right path
- Test & Learn: Test the right path
Katie, Divya, and the other great designers and developers at Sparkbox run workshops on HTML and CSS for girl scouts. They’ve shared their resources and I might just borrow some of them for Codebar.
I often get asked what resources I’d recommend for someone totally new to making websites. There are surprisingly few tutorials out there aimed at the complete beginner. There’s Jon Duckett’s excellent—and beautiful—book. There’s the Codebar curriculum (which I keep meaning to edit and update; it’s all on Github).
Now there’s a new resource by Damian Wielgosik called How to Code in HTML5 and CSS3. Personally, I would drop the “5” and the “3”, but that’s a minor quibble; this is a great book. It manages to introduce concepts in a logical, understandable way.
And it’s free.
A very handy collection from Anna: articles, books, talks, podcasts, and examples of front-end style guides. If something’s missing, feel free to add it.
A collection of device APIs—which, despite the title, are all JavaScript, not HTML. Each API in the list has a link to its spec, an explanatory article, a demo, and the current level of support.
Hyperlinks relating to the talks delivered at An Event Apart in Chicago, including those connected to my rambling musings on progressive enhancement.
How about this for a trip down memory lane—a compendium of articles from over a decade of A List Apart, also available as a Readlist epub. It’s quite amazing just how good this free resource is.
The only thing to fault is that, due to some kind of clerical error, one of my articles has somehow found its way onto this list.
If this were Twitter, you’d be at-replying me with the hashtag “humblebrag”, wouldn’t you?
A nice round-up of responsive and future-friendly resources.
Jonathan gives a thorough overview of the various tools and frameworks out there to help build native, hybrid and mobile web apps. He also shares his decision-making process on when to build what.
Hey, look what's back: Webmonkey! Ah, memories.
A web developer’s life is a merry ol’ life. It just got even merrier with the unveiling of two great new resources.
Bite Size Standards is the brainchild of John Oxton. It’s a collaborative effort put together by a lot of very talented people. The site provides quick, easy to digest nuggets of wisdom for the princely sum of no cost whatsoever.
Vitamin is also providing free, valuable information. Also a product of collaboration, it’s the newest champion from the stables of Carson Systems. The first issue has set the bar high with some excellent articles: be sure to read Mike Rundle’s great article on visual design for the web.
Eric Meyer has also written a great piece for the inaugural issue called Making Popular Layout Decisions. It touches on a lot of the issues that I raised in my recent post about polarisation of opinion. In a nutshell: there are no absolutely right or wrong decisions. The classic example that Eric cites is the ol’ fixed/liquid conundrum (although he does oversimplify things somewhat when he says of liquid layouts, “users with really wide windows will get really long lines of text, which most people find difficult to read” — it ain’t necessarily so, although this is true of the many poorly-implemented liquid designs out there).
The Vitamin site itself is a wonderful example of compromise in that area. It looks equally great at 800 pixels, 1024 pixels, or any other arbitrary browser width. It always give me a warm glow to see such detailed attention paid to the user’s needs.
The visual design is also very appealing. It kind of reminds me of old-school Evolt mixed with K10K, updated for the standards-savvy crowd.
If you take your Bite Size Standards and your Vitamin and wash it down with the always wonderful A List Apart (a triple issue is out this week), you’ve got the perfect balanced diet of web design resources.
And if you don’t like any of them, you can always demand your money back.