Are you interested in becoming a web developer but not sure if you should go to school? You’re seldom going to use one single device to access the web, and web development also leverages a wide variety of languages, technologies, and platforms. This is part of what makes web development such an exciting career prospect. However, the variety can also make it a little hard to start preparing for a career in web development.
Can you learn how to do web development on your own? Should you go to school for web development? And if so, what would that actually entail? To answer all of those questions it’s important to first look at what web developers actually do within the context of their job.
What Is Web Development?
When people think about web development, they tend to see someone using a website or app. They load up a URL in a browser and the content instantly appears. When you click a button on the site you might see new information, move on to another page, or even trigger an email. However, consider how many technologies are involved in those processes.
The website itself runs on a server that sits in a physical location or within the cloud. Your interaction with a site comes about through HTML, JavaScript, and dynamic communication frameworks like AJAX. Those components might even be the result of translation from other programming languages like Python.
A website’s back-end server will typically use applications written in C/C++, Python, and PHP,. Websites also use a variety of pre-built frameworks to streamline a company’s production cycle. However, these frameworks will themselves need a lot of initial work to set up and configure. And all of these development techniques fall under the larger banner of web development.
Plus, a web developer needs to ensure compatibility with all of the major web browsers on both mobile and desktop-based systems. Web developers might even be called on to handle some tasks related to graphic design. This is usually limited to working with cascading style sheets (CSS), but graphic design might extend to simple image editing, font design, or theme creation. There are many aspects to web development, and they must all be learned to succeed in the industry.
Should I Go to School for Web Development?
It’s clear that a web developer needs to master many skills, but it’s less obvious how you’d go about doing so. It’s true that many web developers learn some basic programming on their own. However, there are a number of reasons why this isn’t a great way to learn web development. Likewise, why it’s best to learn the various skills used in web development through a formal Web Application Design and Development program.
Mastering the Many Development Skills
The main reason why formal education is the best option comes back to the earlier discussion of how many skills a web developer needs to master. There was a time when web development could be done with little more than a basic understanding of HTML and a text editor. However, those days are long gone, and today’s modern internet is arguably among the most complex development platforms.
Learn Programming Languages
You need to learn many different programming languages at the same time when learning about web-based development. This produces some of the same complications that you’d run into trying to learn multiple spoken languages at the same time. For example, German and Dutch have a lot in common, but you’d still run into stumbling blocks if you tried to learn them outside of a context that focused on those similarities.
A Support Structure
Likewise, learning the skills related to web development can become exceedingly difficult without guidance. Formal education gives you access to instructors who understand all of the complexities of the modern web. Likewise, they have time-tested methods to capitalize on the shared elements and categorization of the various components a web developer needs to know.
What Do I Learn During a Web Application Design and Development Program?
A Web Application Design and Development program provides you with hands-on instruction in full-stack web development. This ensures that you aren’t just learning about individual elements used within the industry. You’re learning how to properly leverage all of those components with each other and in the context of the larger Web. A formal education is a fully guided path that leads you through the acquisition of all the skills needed to become a junior developer or website administrator.
The 7 1/2-month Web Application Design and Development Diploma program isn’t just a boot camp. It’s designed to meet the needs of people from a wide variety of backgrounds and interests. In fact, you don’t even need prior coding experience to take the course. You’ll learn the principles of effective coding along with the various languages and tools needed to leverage them in real-world environments. These skills encompass a wide variety of topics, but many of them can be effectively categorized into front-end and back-end programming.
Front-End Programming Languages
A project’s front-end is essentially what the end user sees on their computer screen. In the context of a car; the frame, steering wheel, and paint would all be front-end components. In the context of a website that means the buttons, graphical elements, and overall presentation. The actual content that’s displayed in the front-end usually comes from back-end code. However, the site’s users don’t concern themselves with that.
Front-end development is done with a combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. HTML and CSS are fairly straightforward scripting systems used to specify layout, text, and presentation. But JavaScript is where things really start to get more complicated.
The Web 2.0 and HTML 5 concepts introduced the idea of dynamic presentation which blends HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into a whole greater than the sum of its parts. And today JavaScript can be used as a full programming language that runs in a browser. In fact, some other programming languages can even be converted into JavaScript.
Front-end development serves as the introduction to the deeper back-end aspects of development. But make no mistake, this side of the profession has a vast amount of potential for creativity and serious study. Most web apps use a combination of front-end and back-end technologies. However, it is possible to build entire web-based applications solely through HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Back-End Programming Languages
As powerful as the front-end technologies are, there’s always going to be a need for back-end programming. These are the programs that run on remote servers rather than in a user’s browser. The flow of information goes from a web server to a front-end program and then to the user’s screen.
The most common example of this technique involves databases. A database is a massive collection of data that can be quickly accessed by separate programs. One program might alter the information on a database while another accesses it. And this process of input and output can happen thousands of times every second. Learning back-end programming means working with database design concepts while melding them into object-oriented languages like Enterprise-level Java.
Final Thoughts
Formal education helps you learn about all of these concepts and more within a unified system. This is what makes a web development program such an effective way to enter into the profession. You learn about both the skills needed for web development and how to meld them all together into a powerful whole.
Want to Learn More?
The Web Application Design and Development program transforms beginning computer coding students into entry-level full-stack web developers. The Web Application Design and Development program focuses on the main programming languages including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JAVA, Python, SQL, and PHP.
This Web Application Design and Development diploma program at Hunter Business School covers both front-end and back-end web development topics, starting with client-side programming languages such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, then gradually advancing to object-oriented programming, Enterprise Java, and database design.
Through a series of hands-on projects, Web Application Design and Development training program students not only cultivate an understanding of computer coding and programming concepts, but also learn to work in a collaborative team environment, practice software development methodology skills, and prepare a sizable portfolio for their new career.
Contact us today to find out more about how to become a web developer on Long Island.