Helpful tutorials for training as an IT specialist

Helpful tutorials for IT specialists

My name is Fabian Marx and I have decided to train as an IT specialist for application development at Tojio GmbH. As Tojio primarily creates applications for the Internet and websites, it is essential for me to get to grips with the underlying technologies of the web.

There are many places to go for this: from paid online courses to books, which are available on almost every topic, to bootcamps that deal intensively with a specific topic (such as a specific programming language) for a few weeks. In the following article, I would like to introduce some of the online resources that have made it easier for me to get started in web development.

The basics

In most cases, anyone who wants to get involved in web development will want to start with HTML ("Hypertext Markup Language") and CSS ("Cascading Style Sheets"). The reason for this is that these two technologies are the cornerstone of every website. HTML is used to define the content and how it is structured. CSS, on the other hand, allows almost every visual aspect of the content to be changed at will. This in particular makes it possible to give a website a customized look.

Probably the most established place to learn HTML and CSS is the Mozilla Developer Network, which is regularly updated by a large community. The JavaScript scripting language, which is indispensable for web development and enables websites to be designed interactively, is also extensively documented here. All the theory on the various aspects of JavaScript (such as inheritance or asynchronous programming) is explained here in comprehensive articles. There are also exercises for many articles that you can use to check your understanding.

If you prefer something less theoretical and a little more interactive, you should take a look at w3schools.com. Here, visitors are introduced to various aspects of web development quickly and easily. In addition to the technologies already mentioned, smaller aspects of web development are also covered here. For example, you can familiarize yourself with the CSS framework "Bootstrap", which considerably simplifies the optimization of websites for different screen sizes (such as mobile devices), or "jQuery", a JavaScript framework that aims to make JavaScript code less verbose.

The operating system

Even more fundamental and just as important for web developers is a solid knowledge of their own development environment. As the free Linux operating system is used on most servers, it makes sense to use Linux locally as well. Depending on the distribution, Linux can largely only be used effectively via the command line (the "terminal"). Basically, all tutorials that can be found are equally suitable for this (either as YouTube tutorials or in text form). If in doubt, you can rely on this official tutorial for beginners (assuming you are using the distribution "ubuntu", one of the best-known and most established Linux distributions). There should be similar tutorials for other distributions, although it should be noted that the basic commands (change path, create files, change permissions, ...) for the terminal hardly differ from each other in most distributions.

Working effectively together with "Git"

Finally, the version control system "Git" should be mentioned. Git is used to facilitate collaborative work on code. This means that everyone working on the code has the entire code ("repository") stored locally and only uploads the files to the centrally hosted repository that they had to change for a specific extension of the code.