How to Learn Web Programming

There are a lot of different ways to learn anything: reading, listening, watching, doing. In programming, I find the best combination of these is watching and doing.

The Best Approach

The most effective way to learn web programming is to:

1. Watch video tutorials - Visual learning helps you understand concepts and see how things work in real-time
2. Practice immediately - Apply what you’ve learned by building projects
3. Focus on fundamentals first - Learn the syntax and core concepts before diving into advanced topics
4. Build complete projects - Don’t just learn isolated functions; see how everything fits together

Learning JavaScript

JavaScript hasn’t changed too much over the years, so older training videos are probably still OK. But there have been new developments in the past 1.5 years that people are starting to adopt. For example, instead of the classic document.getElementById(""), one might use the newer document.querySelector() to do the same job.

Learning JavaScript is pretty straightforward once you understand:

• The basics of programming
• The basics of HTML

Once you know those two, then JavaScript is just another language. It all comes down to knowing when to do what, and what is faster.

My Recommendation

Try not to kill yourself learning every aspect of JavaScript. You will learn all the functions and objects as you go. Just focus on learning the syntax and concepts first, then start building projects.

Focus on the “how to program” aspect instead of the “how to program with JavaScript” aspect, if you know what I mean.

The best tutorials to watch are ones that complete projects and assume JavaScript knowledge. Then you get to learn how to use the language to your benefit instead of just learning the language itself.