Tags: tutorial

Learn Images

Mat has written this free course for you all about images on the web. Covering image formats, responsive images, and workflows, this is one to keep on speed dial.

An Interactive Guide to Flexbox in CSS

This is a superb explanation of flexbox—the interactive widgets sprinkled throughout are such a great aid to learning!

Lean Web Club

New from Mr. Vanilla JS himself, Chris Ferdinandi:

A learning space for people who hate the complexity of modern web development.

It’ll be $29 a month or $299 a year (giving you two months worth for free).

Add a Service Worker to Your Site | CSS-Tricks - CSS-Tricks

Damn, I wish I had thought of giving this answer to the prompt, “What is one thing people can do to make their website better?”

If you do nothing else, this will be a huge boost to your site in 2022.

Chris’s piece is a self-contained tutorial!

Designing Beautiful Shadows in CSS

This is a great tutorial—I just love the interactive parts that really help make things click.

Responsible Web Applications

An excellent collection of advice and examples for making websites responsive and accessibile (responsive + accessible = responsible).

Cameras and Lenses – Bartosz Ciechanowski

This is a truly wonderful web page! It’s an explanation from first principles of how cameras and lenses work.

At its most basic, it uses words which you can read in any browser. It also uses images so if your browser supports images, you get that enhancement. And it uses interactive JavaScript widgets so that you get that layer of richness if your browser supports the technology.

Then you realise that every post ever published on this personal site is equally in-depth and uses the same content-first progressive enhancement approach.

Service Workers | Go Make Things

Chris Ferdinandi blogs every day about the power of vanilla JavaScript. For over a week now, his daily posts have been about service workers. The cumulative result is this excellent collection of resources.

An Introduction To Stimulus.js — Smashing Magazine

An intro to Stimulus, the lightweight JavaScript library from Basecamp that takes a progressive enhancement approach, as seen with HEY.

One aspect I really like about the approach Stimulus encourages, is I can focus on sending HTML down the wire to my users, which is then jazzed up a little with JavaScript.

I’ve always been a fan of using the first few milliseconds of a user’s attention getting what I have to share with them — in front of them. Then worrying setting up the interaction layer while the user can start processing what they’re seeing.

Furthermore, if the JavaScript were to fail for whatever reason, the user can still see the content and interact with it without JavaScript.

Takin’ five. — Ethan Marcotte

I linked to the first of Ethan’s short videos on accessibility last week, but it’s well worth checking out all five:

1. Introduction to using VoiceOver on macOS
2. Designing beautiful focus states
3. Flexible and accessible typesetting
4. Responsively designing with viewport units
5. Designing beautiful and accessible drop caps

HTML Tutorial for Beginners 101 (Including HTML5 Tags) - WebsiteSetup

A really great one-page guide to HTML from Bruce. I like his performance-focused intro:

If your site is based on good HTML, it will load fast. Browsers incrementally render HTML—that is, they will display a partially downloaded web page to the user while the browser awaits the remaining files from the server.

Modern fashionable development techniques, such as React, require a lot of JavaScript to be sent to the user. When it’s all downloaded, the user’s device must parse and execute the JavaScript before it can even start to construct the page. On a slow network, or on a cheaper, low-powered device, this can result in an excruciatingly slow load and is a heavy drain on the battery.

Learn Box Alignment

A cute walkthrough for flexbox and grid.

Motion Paths - Past, Present and Future | Codrops

This is superbly in-depth and easy-to-follow article from Cassie—everything you need to know about motion paths in SVG and CSS! It’s worth reading just for the wonderful examples.

Build your own React

This is a fascinating way to present a code tutorial! It reminds of Tim’s Tutorial Markdown that I linked to a while back (which in turn reminds me of Bret Victor’s work).

Creating my logo animation - cassie.codes

What a wonderfully in-depth and clear tutorial from Cassie on how she created the animation for her nifty SVG logo!

Also: Cassie is on the indie web now, writing on her own website—yay!

A Complete Beginner’s Guide to React by Ali Spittel

This really is a most excellent introduction to React. Complete with cheat sheet!

Tutorial Markdown

Tim recently gave an excellent talk at FFConf. He mentioned this variation of Markdown, specifically for writing coding tutorials that update as you scroll. You can see it in action on his Generative Artistry site.

Kind of reminds of some of Bret Viktor’s work.

React is just JavaScript – YLD Engineering Blog – Medium

I like that this introduction to React doesn’t assume any knowledge (or desire) to create an entire app from scratch through command line invocations. Instead, here’s a clear explanation of how you can add React—which is, after all, some JavaScript—to an existing project. Oh, and you can write your CSS in CSS.

(Caveat: because everything’s happening in script elements in the browser, what’s outlined here will only do client-side rendering.)

Generative Artistry

Tutorials for recreating classics of generative art with JavaScript and canvas.

Reliable Experiences - PWA Roadshow - YouTube

A good hands-on introduction to service workers from Mariko.