Finding the right way to learn coding languages has been a challenge for me. Nobody told me the right way to learn or how the different languages interacted. Now, I have been a professional web developer since 2014 and I’m here to tell you the best way to learn.
Web development is much broader than HTML, CSS and bringing a design to the web. I would research backend languages and what they do as well as front end languages and how they differ. Find out which ones are popular and how the languages themselves are different. Some may be easier to learn than others. Then I would suggest learning a front-end and a back-end language of your choice to see what you like better—most people have a preference.
Now that you know the basic ins and outs of web development here’s how you start your journey of learning how to code. There are a lot of great websites out there that will teach you the basics. Lynda is one I recommend. It’s $25/month and they have a ton of video tutorials. Codeacademy is another really popular site among beginners. Lastly, don’t forget about YouTube! YouTube is a great (and free) place to watch tutorials on coding as well.
The most important thing is to not get too hung up trying to learn everything. Watch a video series, then attempt to build something. In learning web development, there is often what is called “analysis paralysis.” There is so much to learn that people spend more time watching tutorials on languages than actually trying them out. I once heard someone say to approach learning a computer language as you would a new toy. Just as you wouldn’t spend days researching how the toy works, you would just start playing with it, only using the instructions when you got stuck. I have made this mistake myself in the past, and while I understood the concepts, I couldn’t write the code myself. After finishing a series, I shut off the tutorial and just started trying to build something. Give yourself a project and take baby steps using the help of Google and Stack Overflow until you get the hang of it.