

Ask HN: Which skills do you think a front-end developer should have? - Ocho-Bits

I'm starting my developer career in this area, I'll love to hear some opinions from you guys.  What should I learn? Know?<p>Thanks.
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malandrew
Designing w/ Web Standards, 3rd edition by Jeffrey Zeldman

Dom Scripting by Jeremy Keith

Eloquent Javascript by Marijn Haverbeke - <http://eloquentjavascript.net/>

Learning JQuery by Jonathan Chaffer

"Dive into HTML5" by Mark Pilgrim - <http://diveintohtml5.org/>

"CSS - The Definitive Guide" by Eric Meyer

"Javascript - The Good Parts" by Douglas Crockford

==========================================

Those should pretty much cover everything you must know if you are starting
now. Start with Zeldman's book first and end with Crockford's book, besides
that go ahead and choose your own adventure by reading the rest in any order
you want.

While you will probably get more practical usage out of reading Learning
JQuery before DOM Scripting, I think you will get more value out of Learning
JQuery if you read DOM Scripting first.

~~~
Ocho-Bits
Great suggestions. Thanks!

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dstein
Write a video game using JavaScript/Canvas. Game programming is the fast track
to becoming a great developer because of the mix of skills it requires
(math/algebra, animation, graphics, sound, resource management, testing and
debugging).

And don't cheat by using some fancy pants game engine.

~~~
Ocho-Bits
Great idea! I'll always wanted to write a video game and also learn canvas.

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aonic
Start with basic HTML/CSS knowledge, understand the CSS/DOM rendering
differences between browsers. Learn jQuery, and JavaScript in general.

Understand the DOM, and how traversing in jQuery/JS works. Understand and
learn how to debug JavaScript, and CSS rendering.

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bee
A scripting language (PHP,ASP,Python,etc), sql, html, js, css. And the best
way to start learning is to start doing projects, smaller at first, then
bigger and bigger. You can try doing some project with something that you
need.

