Ask HN: How to learn front-end beyond the basics? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to learn front-end beyond the basics?

12 pointsyura6 comments

There are thousands of materials on how to learn the basics of front-end: HTML, CSS, JS, responsiveness, some front-end library like Bootstrap and JS framework like React. The stuff that you need to land a front-end job; in fact I learned all that and I got a job myself, great!

But where to go from here? I take it that most people become better by learning from their seniors at work, but I work for a small company and unfortunately I don't have any very experienced front-end developer around to learn from, yet at the same time I know that my skills aren't great and there's a lot I still must learn. Googling for "learn front-end" just gives me a ton of materials on how to learn the basics: the stuff I already know. I thought I should turn to books to find more in-depth knowledge, but that's particularly hard in the edge case of front-end development since it moves so fast and a book from 2016 is already pretty much outdated today.

I'm thinking it would be great if there were experienced front-end devs who streamed live coding sessions, or some complex open source front-end projects that one could hack into and also see good front-end code that they should emulate, but I couldn't find anything like that for front-end.

So my question is how do I learn it beyond the basics?

When I learnt front-end dev there were no seniors to learn from — I was part of the first generation, and we pretty much just made it up as we went. We learnt by trial and error, and by looking at each others source code.

And blogs. Read web dev blogs. Much more up to date than books, and you get to see the latest ideas and take part in discussions of evolving standards. My favs: A List Apart, Adactio, Smashing Magazine, CSS-Tricks, Zeldman, Stuff & Nonsense, The Web Ahead, Mozilla Hacks, Coding Horror.

https://alistapart.com

https://adactio.com

https://www.smashingmagazine.com

https://css-tricks.com

http://www.zeldman.com

https://stuffandnonsense.co.uk

http://5by5.tv/webahead

https://hacks.mozilla.org

https://blog.codinghorror.com

Thank you!

Reading different blogs will give you what you want. Learning the basics is just a tip of the iceberg. Here's a good example post,

“7 Practical Tips for Cheating at Design” by Adam Wathan & Steve Schoger https://link.medium.com/I3lzRwMAiV

Look for similar posts. Find good front end developers and follow them on their blogs, Twitter etc. You will automatically know where to look for content after some time.

Hey, sorry that I am not answering your question, but where did you learn frontend? I am in IT but wish to learn such things from scratch like react, css and so on.

I learned the basics of HTML and CSS from 'HTML and CSS: Design and Build Websites' by Jon Duckett, that was enough knowledge for me to build websites with it and look up the rest on MDN as I go. I learned JavaScript from 'JavaScript: The Good Parts' by Douglas Crackford, and figured out the new ES6 changes in a day by reading a few articles online (I already had previous programming experience so learning JS wasn't too hard). I learned Sass, Bootstrap, BEM, etc. mostly by reading the official documentation. And lastly I learned React and Redux from the most popular course on React & Redux at Udemy. I also created a GitHub and committed code there everyday, I made a personal website and hosted it on GitHub Pages and I made two small 'proof-of-concept' React app, so that I had something to show to my potential employers. That was enough for me to land a junior front end job.

I understand that's only the path I've taken and there are multiple ways to get there. Good luck.

care to show us as reference your github account projects mr?

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