A few weekends ago, I taught my first Girl Develop It class for the South Jersey chapter, over the bridge in Haddonfield, NJ. It was the 101 class — a basic intro to HTML & CSS. The class was small, with only 9 students, so it felt really low pressure and conversational.
Throughout the class, the students asked excellent questions about tutorials, resources, and where to go from here. I usually answered by listing off several links, with promises to compile a list of resources in the form of blog posts. For a long time, I’ve had grand plans to create a “Resources” section of this site, with sections on everything from my favorite books on writing to web development tutorials and freelancing resources. I quickly realized there’d be no way for me to churn out something so prolific by the time these women needed me to get them a list of resources, so I did my best to remember everything I’d mentioned during the weekend and sent out the list as a quick email.
So, I suppose the lesson in this is that it’s better to just do the thing, rather than sitting around planning for the day when you have time to make the grander version. I thought the list might be helpful for others who are just starting out and looking for learning resources, so here it is.
Tutorials:
- HTML Dog — HTML Tutorials & Articles
- HTML Dog — CSS Tutorials & Articles
- Learn to Code HTML & CSS by Shay Howe
Helpful Articles/Content/Books:
- CSS Tricks — Tons of CSS articles, blog posts, and tutorials
- A List Apart — A blog “for people who make websites”
- A Book Apart — Publishers of HTML5 for Web Designers, CSS3 for Web Designers, and lots of other books you’ll find useful down the road
- Skillcrush — A lot of their content is advertising for their paid classes, but they have lots of good posts about breaking into the industry, finding work, and acing your first interview
- HTML and CSS: Design and Build Websites by Jon Duckett — A well-designed and nicely laid out intro to the building blocks of the web
- JavaScript and JQuery: Interactive Front-End Web Development by Jon Duckett — When you have a handle on HTML & CSS, this is the next step. Like his other book, this is really nicely designed and easy to understand.
Other Resources (stock photos, lorem ipsum, etc):
- Death to the Stock Photo — They’ll email you excellent stock photos every month or so
- Unsplash — More really beautiful free stock photos
- Meet the Ipsums — All the filler text you could ever want
- CodePen — A place to share your code, get feedback, and learn from others
If you have favorite learning resources you’d like to share, I’d love to hear about them in the comments!
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