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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

The bar for someone starting out in the web industry is insanely high. Learning HTML, CSS, JS and a back-end language, plus database design and enough logic to design a sensible app is a huge amount of work. I have every respect for someone coming to web dev now. I think myself very fortunate to have been a part of it for the past 15 years, if only because I've been able to learn it all over a sensible timeframe.

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I disagree with "insanely high". There are junior, mid and senior roles out there on the market. I can't comment specifically on this course, but there are courses which provide the groundwork for a junior role in the space of 4-6 months. I did one, built some projects and got a couple of job offers within two months of finishing.

I know there's a very slim chance you are going to see this comment, but could you give me more information on what course you took? Thanks!

As someone who knows relatively little about web development, yet knows all about developing desktop applications, it feels a lot like a brick wall. It's hard to know where to start.

Can you list the tools you use to build desktop apps? Maybe someone will be able to point you towards an environment that would be most comfortable for you to get started with web development.

I'm not a professional by any mean, and have only put up my own websites. I found the whole learning process very confusing for years--I would start, then get frustrated and go ack to repairing watches. The books were boring; especially the 500 page block typed phone books--without any graphics. Well things have gotten much better; the books still need improvement, but are much better. I don't know why someone hasen't used the comic book format to get across complex subjects--yes, I believe the less words you use to expain something is Holy. I'm running on like so many teachers do. To your question; starting web developement. My advise is you don't need to know everything about all subjects. A good beginning course on web developement, and computer science is cs 75 at Harvard(it's free, a little outdated, but once you start to hear the computer lingo--it makes further learning less daunting. Get to know Firebug, and source page. Look at the source code for simple websites. Copy it, change it, see how the tags are used(html and css). Everything is free if you look around. Oh, yea--get comfortable with the command line. You will eventually need it, unless you just want to do front end work. (I'm not in the computer industry, but I have heard there are front end designers who just use html, and css--and get paid?) As to those Coding boot Camps--they seem great, but look expensive, or have a catch. There's a free one in San Francisco. They take a percentage of your salary when hired. I looked into that school and the catch was they pretty much only accepted people with CS degrees, or the equivenent. These students would ave eventually got jobs if they studied the right material.(I did copy their curriculim though--It makes a good map of where I need to go.) Another Boot Camp I looked at was expensive, and only accepted women. Why just women? I think the founder of the school knew that Computer Nerds just might question the value of what they were teaching--eventually. I'm not being sexist--I just know that most women are not interested in ths stuff, and html seems like science. Good luck to whom ever asked for advise. One other thing, get regular exercise, and when you are watching the teaching videos-- rember you can always speed them up--1.5 was good for me if the teacher was native, and had reasonable diction. Actually I downloaded all of cs75 on my IPod, and listened to David and the rest on my nightly walks. After, awhile it all started to fit together. Good luck!

Regarding learning visually, this book series has been around for a while. Not sure they are the best at holding attention now that there are interactive online tools like the various codecombat-style places, but take a look:

http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-305619.html

download hivemind (crudzilla.com),

I swear if you follow the 5 step setup on the homepage, you can have a working web app in less than five minutes :)

I am serious, lowering the bar for web development is something we are really trying hard to tackle...

I am happy to get anyone else interested, started.

You're right that there is a lot to learn, but on the other hand, having come to it in the last 5 years or so, there is a lot going for us in that a lot of us are just customizing already built FOSS software.

For instance, although I am trying to cut down on the WordPress projects that I am doing (I am working on projects in a bespoke PHP framework), WP allowed me to have a project up and running and not worry about a lot of the things that I now worry about, all without learning every element of the web.

That said, there are a lot of things that I didn't know (and I am sure that I still don't know) which led to my projects being worse than they had to be... but my point is that for a lot of folks starting out the bar is very low depending on what kind of projects they are working on: it's not necessary to design an app from the ground up to do useful work on the web.

What I'm interested in is if this bar will continue to rise, or if it will stabilize at a certain level.

Stabilization is good. I can better decide if I want to commit the time to learn the skills. The frameworks might change, but I still might only need to learn 4 or so frameworks across 2 or 3 languages.

What I worry about is that it will become the norm to spend 4+ years to get ANY sort of programming position just because you have such a large checklist of requirements.

I think we can say for certainty that HTML, CSS and JavaScript will be around for a while, so that's comforting at least.

I think what may happen is that there will be a minimum level of knowledge that has to be acquired across technologies (HTML, CSS, Javascript, and a backend language), but beyond that we'll see more specialists with deeper understanding of specific parts of the development process. I would think that this would be the typical cycle in any information based profession (doctors, mechanics, etc.).

> I think we can say for certainty that HTML, CSS and JavaScript

Sure, but maybe their relevance will change? https://www.google.com/webdesigner/

the bar is set by companies who have billions in funds. For an internet user it's pretty good, but for developers like me, who also has a day job (totally unrelated / offline) it's no longer a hobby-like thing, and in fact you can not have webdev as a hobby anymore due to very reasons.

Well, that's why people specialize, right? Front-end vs Back-end .etc

There seems to be a push for Full-Stack developers, at least in the Startup community.

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