How to become a web developer

Computer Science or IT related skills have been hot in Indian job market for more 3 decades now. If you have good skills in the field of IT / CS you are in demand. And one such good skills to have is web development. Lets look at how to become a web developer.

What is web development and who is a web developer?

We all have heard of internet. You are reading this article because you are on internet. Internet is made up of millions and millions of web pages and one such web page is what you are seeing now.

But have you wondered from where these web pages come from and what exactly are these web pages and how are they created?

These is where web development comes in. A web development involves creating and maintaining a web site and the person who does that is a web developer.

Now there are many parts to a web development which we will see later, but point I am trying to make is that if you understand the vastness of web, you probably understand the importance of a web developer.

Would like to look at the video instead? Look at our video on our channel CareerNXT.

https://youtu.be/k8TbSKKiQwk

Why you should become a web developer?

As I have mentioned before, web development is a requirement which is going to be there as long as web is there. The only thing which will probably change is the tool and technologies used and if you are good at fundamentals, you can adapt to it fairly quickly. Some advantages of being a web developer are

• Ample job opportunities and ever increasing requirements
• Lots of remote / work from home openings for we developers
• A good amount of freelancing opportunities in web development
• You can open your own company
• You can design your own website if you know web development.
  

What education you need to become a web developer?

To be honest, this is one area where you really don’t need a BCA/BTECH degree. If you have a logical bend of mind and interest to learn something new in the field of computers you can always become a web developer.

Though big companies hiring web developers look for a BCA/BTECH or any computer related degree, but not all and there are many opportunities where a technical qualification is not must for web development. You should show you skills.

How long does it take to become a web developer?

It really depends on how fast you want to do it and what all you are learning. Let go in the details in next section. But if you taking a training course, offline or online there are certificate courses which are 3 month to 6 months duration and diploma/pg diploma courses of 1 year duration.

If you are doing self study, then it all depends on your speed. You can learn it in as less as 1 month or take how much ever time you want.

Remeber there are tons of material on internet / you tube.

So can you teach yourself to be a web developer?

Yes of course you can. no one can stop you !

So what should I learn in web development?

You find web development interesting now and have decided to master it. But question in your mind if what should you learn.

So lets take a step back and understand what encompasses a web page / website.

So the web page you are looking at right now consist of 2 parts

• front end
• back end

Wow! so simple , front end and back end, just 2 words. Well not really.

Front end in website development

What you see in front of you is the presentation part and that is front end of a website development. It consist of the page design which includes apart from lay out of the page, images, graphics, videos etc.

There are specific roles like graphics designer, page designer, User Interface designers, User Experience professionals etc.

Back End in website development

This consist of the information which you see on the web page. For example the web page you are seeing now and this text and images on this web page is stored somewhere which is called as database. The front end designer has designed the way this information will be presented on this web page.

But some one has to write code to pull in this information from data base and give it on front end.

Also some one has to design and maintain the database to hold this information.

All this is part of backend development.

Full Stack Development

Ok, so what is this? Well simple this is end to end development. That is some one who can do front end, backend and database .. all are a full stack developer.

Fundamentals of Web Development

So how should you start learning web development.

• First learn fundamentals ie HTML / CSS / Java Script
  • When you learn HTML you basically understand how the page is structured and that helps you understand how pages are designed.
  • CSS helps you define the style of your elements on webpage. Like if you see a box, what kind of border, shading etc
  • JavaScript helps you manipulate the element, like text boxes on the page.
• Then learn programming languages like PHP
  • The comes server side programming languages.
  • For ex PHP helps you interact between your database and front end.
  • So for example you can read data from mySQL using PHP and send it on the web page.
• Then learn databases like mySQL
  • And then you should get some basic understanding of mySQL and SQL language so that you can store and retrieve the information from database.

So learning above will push you towards understanding web development.

Then you should try learning some frameworks like codeIgniter and Larvel. These are for PHP and will help you in writing your code in a better way.

Moreover PHP is an open source so you can create your own website for free.

You may also like :  Difference between BTECH, BCA and BSC (IT)

One you are through then you can move on to advance areas like

• Node JS
• Angularjs
• Microsoft Technologies for web development
• Python / Django etc

Hope the information above has excited you to become a web developer. Below are some resources you can use for self learning.

1. PHP tutorial on Tutorials Point.
2. BootStrap Tutorial from GetBootStrap
3. Node.Js for beginners on youtube
4. Angular 2 tutorial
5. Web development using DJango
6. CodeIgniter Frame Work
7. Laravel Framework
8. Django Web Framework
9. Node.Js official site

For you to learn web development, you need to setup a web server on your computer (local host) and also install one of the programming languages like php.

To make learning easier and faster you can use EasyPhp. Follow the link below to get EasyPHP on your computer.

EasyPHP Download

EasyPHP installs apache webserver on you computer and along with that you also get mySQL & PHP installed and you get phpmyadmin for accessing your mySQL data base.

You can also install phpmyadmin from here.

You can install any web server as per you choice. Above are recommendations to ease your learning.

So friends, hope you liked this article. If you have any questions, do write to me at skumar@indiacareeradvice.com or post your queries in the comment box.

Happy Learning!

Your friend – Sanjeev