Front-End Development Roadmap
Planning to work as a front-end developer? Well, this roadmap will help you learn and champion the skills and technologies you need to become a front-end developer.
Front-End Development Roadmap
Click a step below to see its details. Mark steps complete to track your progress - saved in this browser.
To kick-start your learning journey, the very first step is to learn the basics of the internet.
-
The internet often referred to as the Net, is a global network that connects all the computers across the globe. In simple terms, the internet is a network of several networks, where the collection of multiple computers from a single network.
-
The client-side in web development is everything visible and takes place on the end users’ devices, which we often refer to as the front-end. Meanwhile, the server-side implies everything that takes place on the server instead of on the client.
-
A browser is a software program that enables users to find and retrieve the desired content available on the World Wide Web (Internet) and displays it on their screens. The content can be of any form, such as images, text, videos, audio, and hyperlinks.
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. It is a markup language to design documents, more specifically web pages or websites, so end users can access them in their web browsers. Moreover, it is one of the three core technologies of the World Wide Web (WWW).
READ:
Tutorial:
The easiest way to learn responsive web design, HTML & CSS and 10 responsive real website projects
-
HTML provides the structure to websites. Since your primary job as a web developer would be designing websites, learning HTML is mandatory. There are various tags in HTML that lets you organize content and other elements on your web page.
READ:
-
Semantic HTML is the use of HTML markup to emphasize the clear meaning of the content in web pages of web applications rather than focusing on presentation or looks. Using semantic HTML, you can make your web pages more informative so that the browsers and search engines can understand them better.
-
HTML5 is the latest and most stable version of HTML. In addition, this version enables you to create web pages and websites that provide a consistent experience to users across different devices. So, it is essential to learn all HTML5 elements and attributes.
-
Following the best HTML and HTML5 practices and conventions while creating the websites is essential as they help you write clean, tidy, and easy-to-understand code. So, learning them would be of great benefit in creating well-structured websites.
-
SEO plays a vital role in making your website visible on the search engine results page (SERP). And HTML is the essential part of technical SEO. Therefore, you must get the upper hand in SEO HTML tags, such as the title tag, meta description tag, heading tag, image alt text, HTML5 semantic tags, schema markup, etc.
Along with HTML, CSS is another core technology of WWW. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet, which is sheet style language for styling HTML elements. HTML only provides structure to your websites, but CSS makes them more visually appealing and attractive.
-
CSS describes how the HTML elements should be presented on web pages or websites. It also saves a lot of work as it enables you to apply a style to multiple web pages or multiple elements on a single web page at once.
-
A layout refers to the arrangement of all HTML elements on a web page. Your website layout should be very effective such that the ned users should be able to understand the message you are conveying through your design. Therefore, you should learn how to make effective layouts.
-
When your web page looks attractive and good on all sizes of screens, we can say that it has a responsive design. So, knowing how to design responsive websites is a must as a web developer. You simply need CSS and HTML to create responsive web designs.
-
Media queries help you create responsive websites. This means that the view of a web page varies from one system to another depending upon the media type or screen. With media queries, you can create personalized style sheets for desktops, laptops, mobile phones, and tablets.
-
SASS is an acronym for Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets, which is a preprocessor scripting language. It is compiled or interpreted into CSS and is an extension to CSS. In addition, SASS enables you to use various features that CSS does not offer, such as mixins, imports, inheritance, variables, and many more.
A framework serves as a foundation for creating websites or developing software applications. While using frameworks, you do not have to write everything from scratch as they take care of every low-level functionality while developing applications.
As a web developer, you should have experience working with a few popular CSS frameworks.
-
Bootstrap is an open-source and free CSS framework for creating responsive and mobile-first websites. It features a wide variety of ready-to-use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript-based templates for forms, buttons, navigation, and many others. Bootstrap 5 is the latest version of Bootstrap.
-
Tailwind CSS is a framework for creating appealing user interfaces for your websites quickly and easily. It is a low-level framework that provides you with all the basic building blocks you need to create user interfaces.
Moreover, it is a utility-first framework, which means you can leverage utility classes instead of the traditional CSS approach for creating custom designs.
-
Foundation is a free and open-source front-end framework that comes with ready-to-use HTML and CSS UI components, code snippets, and templates. It also comes with an email framework for designing responsive HTML emails that you can read on any device.
-
Bulma is a free, open-source, modular, and incredibly lightweight CSS framework based on the Flexbox layout. It provides you with various ready-to-use components for creating responsive UIs.
-
Skeleton is a responsive CSS framework that leverages CSS media queries to style your website that flaunts amazing across all types of devices. It is a lightweight framework used only for creating a handful of HTML elements and comes with a 12-column grid system.
JavaScript is also a core technology of WWW, alongside HTML and CSS. While HTML provides structure to the website and CSS styles the HTML elements, JavaScript provides the behavior to those elements. It makes web pages dynamic and interactive.
-
JavaScript is a client-side scripting language for creating dynamically updating web page content. It controls the behavior of web pages. With HTML and CSS, you can only create static websites. Meanwhile, you require JavaScript to make your website dynamic and interactive.
Start with learning the basics of JavaScript, such as variables, functions, operators, conditionals, events, etc.
-
DOM stands for Document Object Model. The DOM manipulation refers to the interaction of the JavaScript DOM API to alter the HTML document. It lets you create, modify, style, and delete HTML elements without a page refresh.
-
After learning the basics of JavaScript, move on to learning the advanced concepts, such as closures, modules, functional programming, error handling, memory leaks, IIFE, hoisting, type coersion, garbage collection, and many others.
-
API stands for Application Programming Interface, whereas JSON is an acronym for JavaScript Object Notation. JSON is a data interchange and standard file format that is independent of programming languages. On the other hand, APIs are software intermediaries that facilitate communication between two or more computer programs.
Version control, often referred to as source control, is a software program that lets developers keep track of the changes or modifications taking place in their code. Also, it lets multiple developers collaborate and work collectively on a single project.
-
Git is a widely-used distributed version control system used by developers across the globe. It lets multiple programmers collaborate and work collectively throughout software development. Also, it enables them to track changes in any set of files with the aim to maintain data integrity.
-
GitHub is the internet hosting provider for version control using Git and software development. It is responsible for providing the source code management and distributed version control functionality of Git. In short, GitHub lets you host your open-source projects that are visible to everyone across the globe.
-
As you use Git as your version control system, it becomes essential for you to learn all the basic Git commands. Along with Git commands, you should also consider learning all the basic Linux commands.
-
As you initially start developing static websites once you learn the basics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you should also learn how to host those static websites. There are a lot of platforms out there that let you host static websites, such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud Platform, GitHub pages, etc.
Web security is a practice of protecting computer systems and networks from being hacked or damaged. Gain insights into the basics of web security and know what security measures to implement while developing websites.
-
An HTTP request is a message that a client sends to a server in order to access the desired resource. When the server receives an HTTP request, its response to that request is an HTTP status code.
-
Content Security Policy (CSP) is a computer security standard to prevent cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks, clickjacking, and many other injection attacks. These attacks are the results of the execution of malicious code injected within the content of the trusted website.
A package manager is a content management system consisting of various software tools for automating the installation, configuration, upgrading, and removal of software programs.
-
Node.js is a free and open-source runtime environment for JavaScript that runs on Google Chrome’s V8 engine. This environment allows developers to use JavaScript for server-side scripting to create dynamic web page content. It has made it possible for developers to stick to a single language for the front-end and back-end for creating dynamic websites.
-
NPM stands for Node Package Manager. It is a default package manager of the Node.js environment. In addition, it is one of the largest software registries containing around 800,00 code packages.
-
Yarn is a new package manager that replaces the existing workflow for the npm client or other package managers, maintaining compatibility with the npm registry. It lets you share your code with other developers.
A library is a pre-written code that performs a specific task, while a framework is a foundation on which developers build software applications. As a front-end developer, you should have experience working with popular JS libraries and frameworks.
-
React is an open-source, front-end library based on JavaScript for creating interactive user interfaces using ready-to-use UI components. It is generally used for creating single-page applications and reusable UI components.
-
Angular is a web application framework based on TypeScript for creating applications for any platform, such as web, mobile web, native mobile, and native desktop.
-
Vue.js is a progressive front-end framework based on JavaScript for creating UI components and single-page applications. It is based on the model–view–viewmodel (MVVM) software architectural design pattern.
-
Meteor is an open-source software framework for developing web, desktop, and mobile applications using the JavaScript language. It is basically a web framework developed using Node.js. In addition, it supports rapid prototyping and generates cross-platform code quickly.
Only learning the basics of HTML, CSS, and JS is not sufficient. You need to implement those basic concepts to understand how they work in reality. For this, you must work on multiple projects. You can start with simple projects and then move on to developing advanced ones.
-
A tip calculator determines how much to tip at restaurants. To make a tip calculator, you need the basic knowledge of JS, CSS, and HTML. Though the design of a tip calculator is simple, the logic behind it might be pretty complex.
-
Creating a ToDo list app is a beginner-level project that you can create using JavaScript. What you need to know to develop this project is the event handling functions of JS. You need to write the code that makes it possible for users to read, write, update, and update their to-dos lists.
-
A portfolio website lets users or organizations represent their professional information and showcase their skills or services. To design a portfolio website, you need all three core technologies of WWW. It is an intermediate-level web development project.
-
It is an advanced-level project idea. eCommerce applications involve a lot of features to create, such as a login page, product page, cart, payment page, and many others. You must be well-versed in JS, CSS, and HTML concepts, working with major front-end frameworks, and the Node.js environment.
-
Creating social media apps is an advanced-level web development project. You need to incorporate a lot of features in a social media application while focusing on security. Also, you must have hands-on experience working with major web frameworks.
Topics Covered
Hover or tap a topic for more details.