This post was never published. Written in July 2014, it captures the learning landscape of the time — before freeCodeCamp, before Scrimba, before every framework had its own video course.

Introduction

The first HTML tutorial I ever saw was a very very basic one from JimmyR on YouTube, it showed how to make a heading, a horizontal rule as well as a few other basic things, I typed out my first webpage in notepad.exe and saved it as .htm and opened it in Mozilla Firefox and instantly got a rush of euphoria as I saw my first webpage spring to life in front of my eyes!

I HAD CREATED A WEBSITE :O!

Fast forward a few years of tinkering and randomness I am a freelance web developer selling websites and services, that is seriously awesome, and I can't thank the dude enough for posting that tutorial all those years ago.

Now, you might have looked at YouTube tutorials, read up on W3Schools and possibly even checked out CodeAcademy, I'm gonna list a few other resources for you, both free and premium sites.

The free and the good!

I learned all my skills primarily from watching other people's tutorials and reading through instructional sites such as W3Schools and the like, I have since come to accept that a few of the sites I learned from had outdated information already back when I was using them, so I've not included any of those here.

That said, we'll start with the most basic and most necessary skill for anyone who wants to become a web developer, HTML!

I'd recommend that you check out TheNewBoston's HTML5 series on his website, as well as read up on the HTML tags on W3Schools.

Once you're reasonably comfortable writing HTML you might want to learn some CSS to make it look pretty, TutsPlus has a great free course for learning beginner to intermediate CSS, you can find it here.

When you've got the HTML & CSS combo down you want to start making your websites dynamic and awesome, to do that you need a server side programming language like PHP, a great resource for everything PHP is the PHPAcademy videos on YouTube, stay clear of some of the older videos though as they have some bad practices in them.

Forums and Communities

• DigitalPoint
• SitePoint

The draft ended here. The forums and communities section never got fleshed out. In 2014, StackOverflow was already eating everyone's lunch, but we were still listing forums.