Stepping into the world of full stack web development

Everything is shifting to digitization with every passing year and full stack developers are in high demand now. It is the perfect time to start learning full stack web development now.

If you are new to the world of web development and don’t know where to start your journey, then this post will give you an overview of steps you have to go through in order to become a full stack web developer.

And here comes the question. Who is a full stack developer?

By definition, a full stack web developer is a person who can develop both client and server software, which means, if you’ve decided to become a full stack developer you should acquire skills to write programs for a browser, server and database.

The path to becoming a full stack developer is not hard. But it is long and takes time. It’s not about knowing single pieces of information, it’s about connecting the dots.

So what’s the first step?

1. Learn the basics

The very first step of web development is learning HTML & CSS. They are the basic building blocks of a website. Your web browser only understands html & CSS. So no matter what advanced frameworks or languages you use to build your website — in the end they all get converted to html & CSS.

Html and CSS

“Html & CSS are the basic building block of a website. So being good at html & CSS is a crucial step that you cannot skip if you wish to tread the career path of full stack web development.”

Hyper Text markup Language (HTML) defines the basic layout of a website. In other words we can say that they are the skeleton of a website.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) defines styles of a website. They define things like colour, font size, shadow, background etc. In short, they are responsible for making a website beautiful.

JavaScript

After Html and CSS, the next step is to learn JavaScript. It is the basic building block of a dynamic website.

Even though JavaScript is a complex language, the basics are very easy to learn and implement. However as the language evolves more and more, advanced features are added to the language.

As for the frontend frameworks like React, Vue and Angular and backend frameworks like Node JS, knowledge of JavaScript is a prerequisite. Hence, learning JavaScript is also an important step that you cannot skip in the journey of web developer.

2. Learn Responsive web design

Before jumping into advanced stuff there is one more thing you have to master, and that is responsive web developing. It is not a language or program, but an art of writing your html code in a way that your website can be viewed on different devices without any problems. There is no fixed way to master responsive web developing. What you can do is practice a lot and it will come naturally. Bootstrap, Material UI, Tailwind, etc. are some CSS frameworks that help us to create responsive websites.

3. Learn frontend frameworks

Frontend Frameworks

A software framework is a pre-written app structure for you to build on top of. Practically, it’s a collection of files and directories you add your own code and files to. A framework is meant to help you build applications quickly by addressing common development problems and often provide us with Boilerplate code.

Let’s take a look at the most important frontend frameworks in web development.

React

React is an open-source, front end, JavaScript library for building user interfaces or UI components. It is maintained by Facebook and a community of individual developers and companies. React can be used as a base in the development of single-page websites.

Angular

Angular is a TypeScript-based open-source web application framework led by the Angular Team at Google and by a community of individuals and corporations. Angular is a platform and framework for building single-page client applications using HTML and TypeScript. Angular is written in TypeScript. It implements core and optional functionality as a set of TypeScript libraries that you import into your apps.

Vue

Vue is a progressive framework for building user interfaces. Unlike other monolithic frameworks, Vue is designed from the ground up to be incrementally adoptable. The core library is focused on the view layer only, and is easy to pick up and integrate with other libraries or existing projects.

Choose your frontend framework

So what you have to do is pick any one of the frameworks and start learning them. They all have their pros and cons, so picking a framework depends entirely on the nature of the project you are going to work on.

4. Learn Backend Frameworks

After learning frontend frameworks you can jump to backend frameworks. If you’re only developing on the frontend side of a project, it is not necessary to add a backend framework to your skill-set. However, to gain a profound understanding of how everything fits together, you should at least understand the very basics of a backend framework.

Backend framework runs on the backend server and serves Html, JSON (etc) to the frontend side. They are libraries of server-side programming languages that help build the backend structure of a website. Backend frameworks provide ready-made components for developing a dynamic web application.

When it comes to choosing a backend framework you have many options. However we can narrow it down to two currently relevant options, Django and Nodejs. If you are a fan of python then you can go with Django and if you are a fan of JavaScript then you can go with Nodejs.

Node.js

Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform back-end JavaScript runtime environment that executes JavaScript code in a backend server. It is extremely powerful especially if used together with the Express middleware.

Node.js app runs in a single process, without creating a new thread for every request, making app development very efficient. It also enables developing apps with a single programming language, which means it is possible to build an app with the same code for both the server-side and client-side.

Django

Django is one of the most popular open-source Python frameworks.

It is a powerful framework and serves a wide range of use cases. It is often called the web framework for perfectionists with deadlines, which truly captures its nature. It reuses the code that is already there and focuses on new parts, which makes a developer’s work incredibly fast.

Another advantage of Django is security, and that explains why it has been widely chosen by many big companies, to deal with sensitive data.

Conclusion

Post CoVid, a lot of businesses are shifting to online platform. Web development skills are in very high demand right now and if you have not started yet, this is the perfect time to start learning web development.

Learning web development will be a profitable choice if one wants to work as a full-time employee or as a freelancer. Even if you’re already an experienced web developer you should invest some time to keep up with latest technologies and frameworks.

I hope this article achieves the aim of putting you on the right track to become a full stack web developer!!

Feel free to reach out to me for any kind of help, and refer to my GitHub repo Jithin Satheesh, for some of my works!

Happy learning 🙌.