In March of 2021, I embarked on my web development journey after much
deliberation. However, taking this step was not an easy decision at all.
If you’ve not written code for the first 20 years of your life, like me,
then chances are that you may conceive web development as something only
smart people do.
Much to my surprise, after 6 months of learning web development from Udemy
and Neog.camp, I discovered that web development is a learnable skill, a
very learnable skill. All one has to do is learn three tools - HTML, CSS
and JavaScrip. We’ll get to that in a bit. First let us understand what
web development is.
To put it simply, web development is the process of creating and maintaining websites, which includes various activities like web design, maintenance and database management.
A typical web page is made up of three layers:
These three layers conjoin to deliver an experience to the visitors of a webpage. While there are a number of tools that can be used to build these three layers, the most common ones used in tandem are HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Hypertext Markup Language, fondly referred to as HTML, is used to create the content layer of a webpage. Hypertext is a text that is readable by a computer, and markup language provides meaning to any given hypertext and dictates how it should be formatted and laid out. In essence, HTML is the structural foundation of a page that browsers use to display contents of a page.
Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, is a language that provides the design layer of a webpage, and is used to make web pages look more presentable using colors, typography, positioning and other visual styles. CSS is basically used to change the appearance and aesthetics of a webpage.
Last but not least, JavaScript is a programming language that forms the
behavioral layer and adds interactivity to a webpage. It allows one to
implement dynamic features on websites that otherwise cannot be done using
HTML and CSS. Using JavaScript, one can collect data, call APIs, track
clicks and more. JavaScript is an essential tool to build modern websites
and web applications.
One analogy that has helped me
understand the uses of HTML, CSS & JavaScript is as follows:
Imagine a human body, the skeletal system is HTML (which forms the
structure of the body), the skin and muscles are CSS (which contributes to
the appearance of the body), and the brain and the nerves are JavaScript
(which dictates the behaviour of the body)
While there is a lot to modern web-development, one has to start from the basics. But rest assured, with consistency and commitment, any skill is learnable, and web-development is no exception. In the past 1 month, I have built 11 web-applications using the aforementioned technologies, and if I can do it, anybody in the world can.