There are various ways to learn about web development. As a matter of fact, I’m working on a large post as we speak on great ways to learn it. Books are naturally something I gravitate to (I’m sure you can tell I’m a book geek by the books on the right), but it seems “How-To” books these days are junk. How to code, how to design, how to make money and how to market all spit out the same useless junk.

While you may find a rare gem or two in the “how-to” section, it’s tough. When learning HTML over 10 years ago as a middle-school kid, I turned to a book series called “HTML For Dummies” (suits me perfectly, eh?). While this helped me get a few of the basics down, I quickly found out that it’s best not to learn web development from a book. I’m relearning this experience as we speak, while I’m going through “PHP For Absolute Beginners” by Jason Lengstorf. I don’t recommend this book and I don’t recommend learning PHP from a book either.

What’s wrong with books?

There are several problems with learning something as complicated and fickle as any computer language. While reading through this may help get the basic syntaxes down, you’ll most likely never learn the full code by reading and/or completing the exercises. Why?

  • Many book editors don’t know anything about code, therefor the book most likely contains millions of errors in the code (like the PHP books I’m reading now) and if you have ZERO knowledge of the code, you have no way of knowing how to debug. This will leave you frustrated and cursing.
  • Although basic code doesn’t change very often or much, if the book you buy is more than a year old, it could be using some outdated practices. I wouldn’t even look at a coding book if it wasn’t published in the last 6 months.
  • There’s no one to explain the code. While most coding books have a basic explanation of the code, most of the books are centered around active exercises. These often don’t explain the code line-by-line or why you need this or that character. While you may be able to complete all of the exercises, can you write something else from scratch? Will you remember it all?

So how do I learn?

I don’t want to get too in depth on learning web development on this post, but the best way to learn is to learn by doing and by example. Find some snippets of code or download a website from a developer friend and copy it. This is the only time copying is ever ok – when you’re trying to learn something. This is how most designers learn to design – by looking at great design work and figuring out how to implement those styles and cues into their own work. The same goes in web development.

That being said, I don’t like being a quitter and since I won this book in a contest, I’m going to continue to go through the exercises, and hope that something sticks. Even though the last two examples they gave were wrong and didn’t work without hacking them, I want a basic understanding of PHP while my programmer is away on vacation. I know enough PHP to make contact forms, if/elses and do almost anything on WordPress, but I don’t know much or anything of backend PHP or how to write it from scratch.

How did you learn?

What do you think about programming books? Do they work for you? What did you use and how did you learn your web language of choice?

Picture courtesy of rocketnewton

 

Amber Weinberg

Amber is a freelance front-end developer specializing in semantic and accessible custom WordPress themes. She works with agencies and other freelancers to bring their designs to life using custom ACF flexible layout builds - making them more performant and less buggy while allowing the client easy customization without breaking the design system.