What You Need to Know to Be a Front End Developer
Building a beautiful, modern front-end design requires more consideration. From user experience to bold visual elements, to animation — there’s a lot to think about. It’s also more exciting than ever.
Front end web developers use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to code the website and web app designs created by web designers. The code they write runs inside the user’s browser (as opposed to a back end developer, whose code runs on the web server). Think of it a little like this: the back end developer is like the engineer who designs and creates the systems that make a city work (electricity, water and sewer, zoning, etc.), while the front end developer is the one who lays out the streets and makes sure everything is connected properly so people can live their lives (a simplified analogy, but you get the rough idea). A front end web developer is also in charge of making sure that there are no errors or bugs on the front end, as well as making sure that the design appears as it’s supposed to across various platforms and browsers.
A good website starts with a modern interface. This includes a design that features elements in current styling, a trend or two, and a fully-responsive interface that works seamlessly across devices.
Technologies you need to know -
1. HTML & CSS :
HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are the most basic building blocks of web coding. Without these two things, you can’t create a website.
For starting your career in web development you need to be master in HTML and CSS coding. And the good this is you can be master in both in just few weeks with little hard work and effort.
2. JavaScript
JavaScript lets you add a ton more functionality to your websites. You can even create a lot of basic web applications using nothing more than HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (JS for short). On the most basic level, JS lets you add a lot of interactive elements to your websites.
JavaScript is most commonly used as a client-side scripting language. This means that JavaScript code is written into an HTML page. When a user requests an HTML page with JavaScript in it, the script is sent to the browser and it’s up to the browser to do something with it. They can be used to validate the form, toggle elements in web pages on different events, to deliver attractive animations/transaction effects to different elements. You can use it to create things like maps that update in real time, interactive films, and online games, it can also use to communicate with the server without refreshing the page(ajax) and manipulate the content of the page on different events.
It’s also the most popular programming language in the world, so regardless of your dev career plans, it’s a super valuable thing to learn.
3. jQuery
jQuery is a JavaScript library: a collection of plugins and extensions that makes developing with JavaScript faster and easier. Rather than having to code everything from scratch, jQuery lets a front end web developer add ready-made elements to projects, then customize as necessary (one reason why knowing JavaScript is so important). You can use jQuery for things like countdown timers, search form autocomplete, and even automatically-rearranging and resizing grid layouts.
4. Front End Frameworks
The aim of frameworks is to provide a common structure so that developers don’t have to redo it from scratch and can reuse the code provided. Frontend frameworks usually consist of a package made up of a structure of files and folders of standardized code (HTML, CSS, JS documents etc.) … Creation of standard CSS classes which can be used to style advanced components of the user interface.
Consider your skills when choosing a front-end framework. If you’re a beginner, a more robust framework like Bootstrap may be in order, as it comes prepackaged with many useful widgets and requires minimal coding skills
Top 5 Front-End Frameworks you can learn :
- Bootstrap
- Semantic-UI
- Foundation
- Materialize
- Skeleton
5. JavaScript Frameworks :
JS frameworks (including AngularJS, Backbone, Ember, and ReactJS) give a ready-made structure to your JavaScript code. There are different types of frameworks for different needs, though the four mentioned are the most popular in actual job listings. These frameworks really speed up development by giving you a jumpstart and can be used with libraries like jQuery to minimize how much from-scratch coding you have to do.
Top 5 JavaScript Frameworks you can learn :
- AngularJS
- Backbone
- ReactJS
- Polymer
- Mithril.js
Other things you need to know
- Experience with RESTful Services and APIs
- Responsive Website
- Should know Ajax call and methods
- Cross-Browser Development
- Git/bitbucket
This blog is originally published Techscript24
Thanks for reading! Happy coding
