Embarking on a journey into frontend web development? Equip yourself with the right tools. Discover the seven essential instruments that can streamline your workflow, enhance your creativity, and elevate your coding prowess to new heights.
Essential Tools for Frontend Development
Web development tools have come a long way in just a few short years
- Thanks to this progress, we can harness the power of highly tested libraries to improve our workflow and benefit from greater possibilities when it comes to responsive design.
- From browser add-ons and plugins, to processors that streamline your code, there have never been more possibilities for creating awesome web applications.
Final thoughts
If the idea of learning these frontend tools and setting out on a seven-month journey to become a web developer appeals to you, I really recommend you look at our Full-Stack Web Development Program.
- It’s designed to teach you the core frontend technologies from scratch, before proceeding to endow you with much sought-after skills in JavaScript development.
Chrome Developer Tools
Bundled and available in both Chrome and Safari, they allow developers access into the internals of their web application.
- A palette of network tools can help optimize your loading flows, while a timeline gives a deeper understanding of what the browser is doing at any given moment.
AngularJS
Developed by Google, AngularJS lets you extend your application’s HTML syntax, resulting in a more expressive, readable, and quick to develop environment that could otherwise not have been built with HTML alone.
- Some feel that data binding makes for messy, non-separated code, but we still think it’s an invaluable skill to have in your frontend kit.
jQuery
A fast, small, cross-platform JavaScript library aimed at simplifying the frontend process.
- By abstracting a lot of the functionality usually left for developers to solve on their own, jQuery allowed greater scope for creating animations, adding plug-ins, or even just navigating documents.
Sass
A tool that will help you write maintainable, future-proof code while reducing the amount of CSS you have to write
- Although a little tricky to get to grips with initially, Sass’s combination of variables, nesting, and mixins will render simple CSS when compiled, meaning your stylesheets will be more readable and DRY.
What You Should Do Now
Get a hands-on introduction to web development
GitHub
Allows you to view any changes you’ve made or even go back to your previous state (making pesky mistakes a thing of the past).
- A rich open-source community makes collaboration between teams easy and collaborative.
- Many employers will look for finely-honed Git skills
CodePen
Best for showcasing your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript snippets
- Elegant way to show off not just the code behind features you’ve built but also how they are displayed to users
- Can be used for building or overhauling your web developer portfolio
