The Beginning of A Web Development Journey: Information, Discoveries and Reflections for Busy People

In this blog I plan to write about my experiences as I learn about web development. Maybe you’re traveling a similar path or are curious about what it’s like to try to learn coding with online resources. Come along for the ride – we can help each other out!

I became curious about web development because it looks like a lot of fun and a good way to make use of my interests in problem-solving and communication. I also am intrigued with the ability to bring together people from all over the world around common interests.

I’m brand-new to web design and can take forever to make decisions, so I decided to try Wix’ Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) to set up this blog quickly. It may have a simple look but it’ll do for now.

A Bit About Me

About as green as they come

I’m married with three grown kids. Before having children I taught middle- and high-school mathematics. After having children we homeschooled until each child reached high school. I enjoy exercising/sports, reading, chess, and giving neck-rubs to our two cats in my free time. If you're down for a casual correspondence chess game, feel free to reach me on Lichess (lichess.org/@/rachel8).

How to Learn About Web Development?

After researching programs, I narrowed down my choices to two, The Odin Project and Learn Enough. The Odin Project offers a free program that is open source, which means that its code and curriculum are open for everyone to see and contribute to. Although the material looks attractive, I ended up choosing Learn Enough. I may end up circling back to check out The Odin Project’s resources if I find myself floundering on a topic in Learn Enough.

Learn Enough has an integrated sequence of online courses for beginners which enable you to “learn enough” to do basic things. They teach you how to use tools that developers use in real life. The courses are mostly written by Michael Hartl, who won a teaching award while at Caltech and is known among web developers as the creator of a terrific Ruby on Rails tutorial.

While excited about the approach, I admit I was disappointed that the first course is on the Unix command line. (Here we're using the term Unix broadly to refer to a family of operating systems that includes Linux, Android, iOS, and macOS.) I decided to trust that this is the way to go. I really do need to learn the basics! You can access all the courses for $49/month, or just choose one course at a time for $19/month for the first four courses and $29 or $39/month for the advanced ones. You can pause the subscription at any time. Scholarships are also available for those in need. Each tutorial includes the following features:

· online readings with exercises

· videos

· exercise answers

· access to a Slack chat group

· sample lessons to try out.

Optional hard-copy books published by Pearson/Addison-Wesley are available on amazon.com for those who prefer this format. The first book, Learn Enough Development Tools to Be Dangerous, covers the first three courses. You can see the table of contents of the paperback version using Amazon’s “Look inside” feature, which will give you a feel for what’s taught in each course.

The integrated series of courses offered by Learn Enough

Working through some online sample material in the Command Line course, I came across my first Big Challenge. Because my laptop runs on Windows I couldn’t do the command line course without setting up either a Linux operating system on my laptop or a Linux-based integrated development environment (IDE) on Amazon’s cloud. Yikes!

Beginning as a Middle-Aged Noob

Tux the Unix mascot

After reading that it would be easier to set up an account with Amazon Web Services (AWS) than to install Linux on my laptop, I decided to go with the first choice. I had no idea what I was doing but I followed the instructions from Learn Enough and somehow I managed to set up a Linux-based IDE in the cloud. AWS doesn’t charge for the first year of usage so I put a reminder on the calendar of my phone to check on this a year from now.

An IDE or Integrated Development Environment is essentially software that provides comprehensive tools for software development. AWS provides this in the cloud so that you can write and edit programs from anywhere with an internet connection using a web browser on any computer. When you log in to your account, all your work and tools are ready to be accessed right where you left off. The IDE has tools that work well together with similar user interfaces to make it an easier experience for programmers. Actually, for the first course it seems we only need the terminal window but we’ll see whether we’ll be using this IDE for future coursework.

I completed Chapter 1 – so far, so good!

Books

The first two Learn Enough books

I ordered the first two Learn Enough books: Learn Enough Developer Tools to Be Dangerous, which covers the first three courses (Command Line, Text Editor, and Git Version Control), and Learn Enough HTML, CSS and Layout to Be Dangerous, which covers the next two courses. These appear to be quality trade paperbacks. Perusing the pages, I noted that the author peppered the pages here and there with subtle humor, a nice treat.

I like that Learn Enough makes their material available in different formats to make learning as effective and convenient as possible. Accessing the coursework in different formats will help the information to stick in our brain. Also, one format will likely clarify a concept that might be unclear to us in another.

Some of you might choose to forgo the print material to save money and house clutter, and that’s totally fine. Personally my mind focuses better using a book alongside my laptop and I also find it easier to flip pages in a physical book when I need to refer back to something. In addition, reading from a physical page gives my eyes a break from using a screen. You should choose whichever learning mode(s) work best for you. Just be aware that print materials in the tech world do become outmoded fairly quickly. These books came out in 2022, so we’re good to go as of this writing.

Three Weeks Into the Command Line Course

Well, if you were choosing Learn Enough for the online community you may be disappointed. It’s crickets at the Slack chat! Perhaps people just whizzed through this first course, “learned enough” and moved on to the next course. In any case, answers for all exercises are provided on the course website, along with students’ responses, so really everything worked out fine.

Dr. Hartl designed the lessons well, breaking up each topic into sub-topics with practice exercises at just the right spots. Reading each lesson first, watching the brief video, and then doing the corresponding exercises helps me to understand and absorb the material. So far I haven’t felt overwhelmed, except for once when I came back from a week-long break that I had to take (life happens). I just re-did some of the material to refresh my memory.

Danger, Will Robinson, danger!

If you choose to use Amazon Web Services, make sure you click on Cloud9 and not CloudShell when logging in each day. I made the mistake of inadvertently using both on different days because I didn't realize that these were two different ways of accessing two different command lines. The files you create on one are not recognized on the other, so you will have issues with some of the exercises if you’re not careful.

I have to admit that it feels pretty cool to be learning how to control directly the files and directories on a system. If I ever had to do the same on my laptop, maybe it wouldn’t be too difficult to learn how to bypass Windows and use the command line.

Starting the Text Editor Course

It took about a month to complete the Command Line course (yay!) and I then started Text Editor, the second course in the Learn Enough series.

I thought I would zoom through this course, but first of all, family responsibilities had to take priority, and second, I ran into some hiccups related to using a different operating system and text editor from the ones used by Dr. Hartl. He uses a Mac, and for this course he briefly introduces Vim and then moves on to modern text editors, using Atom and Sublime Text in particular. Since I have a Windows laptop, I had been using Amazon Web Services’ Cloud9 terminal for the Command Line course, as I had mentioned earlier. For the Text Editor course I started with Vim on Cloud9 and then chose to use on my laptop Visual Studio Code (VS Code), a popular editor and one of the ones recommended in the course. While it’s true that, as Dr. Hartl says, one can apply technical sophistication to work through these differences, it also means that one will have issues and will need to spend extra time finding workarounds.

Resting after applying technical sophistication

In any case, I’m powering through and hoping this course won’t take too much longer. I posted some solutions on the Slack chat in case others have the same experience. So far I haven’t heard anyone mentioning the same challenges in Slack. Once or twice I did come across some posts from kind folks having the same issues who shared their solutions on the course website (thank you so much!), but eighty-something student posts is a lot to sift through to find those one or two gold nuggets.

How About You?

How did you become interested in web development? Have you started a course yet? How’s it going so far? I’d love to hear from you! You can drop me a line by clicking on the blue button in the lower right corner.

I’ll try to write updates when I have the time. If you’d like to be notified when a post comes out, you can subscribe below.