The New Method Handbook for Learning Web Development

Have you decided to learn web development, but don’t know where to start or what path to follow? You're not the only one. Learning web development is hard, especially as an adult with other responsibilities.

Just making the decision to learn web development creates a thousand questions. Your first step may have been Google, which gave you about 311,000,000 results ranging from college courses to YouTube tutorials. Maybe you asked some web developer friends and they pointed you to books on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ruby, or Python.

There's a plethora of content options for learning web development, but making sense of all of it is overwhelming.

Cool: Treehouse uses CodePen for "Code Playground"

I'm a fan of Treehouse. They do great stuff on a regular basis. They're arguably the best place online to learn web development and their growing student body of 25,000+ aspiring web developers is proof.

Udemy explodes with "experts" teaching online

The Next Web reports that Udemy, a marketplace connecting experts with paying students, has signed on 15,000 new experts during January and February of this year. That's a lot of experts.

Although I feel like this press release devalues the term "expert", I am very intrigued at what it might mean for online education. If Udemy is able to find students for all those experts, then we'll see the tide toward online education shift even further.

Project Euler: Advanced mathematical & programming challenges

Project Euler is like a drive-thru for experiencing the agony of solving hard problems. However, it's also a surprising rush when you do solve a problem because it means you have a decent grasp of both your programming language and basic mathematics.

The problems become increasingly difficult as you progress. The first problem took me about 5 minutes to solve with just a few lines of Ruby. The fourth problem took me 4 hours. And that's when I decided it was time to take a break for the day.

If you're feeling adventurous or have a little time on your hands and want to try something new, give Project Euler a try.

Using projects as learning tools (the right way)

Putting to practice what you've learned from a book or online lesson is a great way to reinforce and add application to the knowledge you've gained. But do a project is incredibly unhelpful advice. In fact, it only creates more questions.

What project? What kind of project? How big of a project? What should it do? What should it try to accomplish? What do I want it to teach me? Should it be something worth putting in my portfolio? How much time should it take me? With all these questions, the project has now become another obstacle to your learning success instead of an aid.

Cargo-Bot: a fun way to learn programming concepts on iPad

 

There are two ways to learn programming concepts: the fun way and this way. I've tried both and much prefer the fun way. Cargo-Bot is an iPad game that teaches programming concepts by solving increasingly difficult puzzles. However, unlike other puzzle games, this one forces you to think like a computer by limiting your options to only what a computer can do.

The best thing about Cargo-Bot is that it lets you learn programming concepts without the mental weight of learning a programming language. When I was first learning Ruby, Cargo-Bot really helped me understand for-loops, while-loops, recursive functions, arrays, and how to count (yes, you'll need to re-learn how to count when learning to program). And learning all that just felt like playing a (deceptively addictive) puzzle game.

I highly recommend Cargo-Bot if you have an iPad.