So, you've decided to learn web development. Nice! The bad news: there's a million different resources online for learning HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and it's hard to know where to start.
We've put together a few of our favorite free web development resources, with a few videos, books, and courses, to serve different learning styles and paces. Are we missing anything that you've learned a ton from? Let us know on Twitter!
This free, three-hour (!) JavaScript course is a wonderful introduction to writing JavaScript from freeCodeCamp. With almost two million views at time of writing, it's a clear success, and a great place to start.
In your web dev career, you'll spend a lot of time massaging your HTML, CSS and JavaScript together. This three-hour tour through HTML and CSS from DesignCourse is an awesome introduction.
The always great Wes Bos has a great 30-day vanilla JS (plain JavaScript, with no frameworks, plugins or extensions) course to help you understand what you can build with just JavaScript.
In a nice twist, Dave Geddes has developed a great course for learning CSS Flexbox layouts with a web-based game (!) that encourages you to learn Flexbox via a super interactive and entertaining style. It's a super interesting approach to learning how to code – I'd love to see more games in this style!
It's not quite a course, but it can be useful to check out recommended resources on a larger scale. If you're interested in seeing all the different tools, concepts, and theory that the average developer is using in their day-to-day career, Kamran Ahmed's popular Roadmap site is a great way to get a high-level view into your webdev learning progress.
JS Teacher's JavaScript Grammar is a free, community-supported ebook that teaches the basics of many new JavaScript features and syntax – it's a great resource particularly for developers who want to be confident in using the newest JavaScript features available in the language.
Kyle Simpson is a prolific JavaScript teacher, and his free book "You Don't Know JavaScript" has taken on a life of its own due to the medium it's shared on: GitHub. YDKJS is a hugely popular text, used to teach developers around the world (I've used many diagrams from it in my own teaching – it's so good!), and if you want to dig into some of the particular quirks of JS as a language, this is the text for you.
This edition of the YDKJS book series is exclusively sponsored by Frontend Masters.
Frontend Masters is the gold standard for top-of-the-line expert training material in frontend-oriented software development. With over 150 courses on all things frontend, this should be your first and only stop for quality video training on HTML, CSS, JS, and related technologies.
I teach all my workshops exclusively through Frontend Masters. If you like this book content, please check out my video training courses.