I am not going to bother you with the things we all know: everyone learns different, how to make a learning schedule et cetera. This post will deal with good sources to start learning. Jet you have to keep in mind that they might not be the most fitting depending on your tech stack and the tech stack your company applies. Moreover, I only cover languages, frameworks and tools I have used.
PHP and Major PHP Frameworks
When I started to learn web development I was working in a company that used PHP. I know PHP does not have the best reputation but it has changed. Compared to other languages, PHP as well as the major frameworks associated with it (Laravel, Symfony) had the time to learn from mistakes and make improvements. PHP is widely used and you can learn a lot of core concepts in just one udemy course: PHP for beginners. I know this course is becoming a bit dusty but it is still worth a try. If you are new to udemy you should know that the platform has sales very often. Do not buy courses for the full price, just wait a bit if you can afford the time.
If your company even uses Laravel or Symfony, I can only recommend the official tutorials of those two: Laracasts and SmyfonyCasts. Both offer PHP learning content as well, so the framework specific courses could be enough and you might not even need udemy.
JS Frameworks
The modern web development world is a world of Javascript frameworks. I mainly worked with Vue.js and I learned it hands on from other developers. There is an official learning platform, Vue Mastery, which – imho – is rather for beginners. Compared to SymfonyCasts which have “knee deep into the framework” courses, Vue Mastery is good for someone with less knowledge but not for someone who searches detail answers on framework internals.
Apart from videos, most bigger frameworks or tools offer an official documentation. It is always best to refer to the official docs rather to any stack overflow post. But we all know it: writing documentation is neither easy nor do people seem to love it, especially when it comes to good, useful documentation. This means documentation can be wrong or outdated, too. Especially in the fast-moving world of JS frameworks, documentation is sometimes overtaken by reality. In case of doubt it is worth to check the project’s Github for open issues or discussions. You can also start a discussion if you are unsecure. In maintained/active projects, you should recieve an answer the sooner or later. And if nothing helps, you can still check the project code itself.
Books
For getting a general overview of things on a topic I can recommend the “for dummies” (ger.: für dummies) book series by Wiley. It will not teach you everything fully but I think the books are suitable for a shallow introduction to topics and they helped me a bunch regarding to learn the correct wordings. If you have a specific interest feel free to contact me on a topic and maybe I can help you out.
