Learn Enough HTML, CSS and Layout to Be Dangerous: Introduction - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v ->Hi, I'm Lee Donahoe.</v> <v ->And I'm Michael Hartl.</v> <v ->And we're the authors</v> of "Learn Enough HTML, CSS, and Layout to Be Dangerous." In this tutorial, you'll learn how to make modern websites using HyperText Markup Language, or HTML, and Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS. HTML and CSS are the fundamental building blocks of every website. The HTML provides the structure for the page, and CSS styles it to make it look good in a browser. You can think of this tutorial as a website in a box. It's everything that you need to design, build, and deploy a modern website that is easy to update and can be used for a personal homepage, a hobby, or a business. Every step of the way, you will use real tools used by professional developers and you will publish your work online by deploying it to the live web. <v ->The only prerequisite</v> for "Learn Enough HTML, CSS, and Layout to Be Dangerous" are knowledge of the UNIX command-line, a text-editor, and version-control with Git as covered, for example, by "Learn Enough Developer Tools to Be Dangerous." These prerequisites allow us to use good software development practice throughout the tutorial. This includes using a text-editor to ensure readable code formatting and the use of version-control to track changes in our projects. Using Git also makes it easy to publish your work for free with GitHub Pages. The skills you'll develop in "Learn Enough HTML, CSS, and Layout to Be Dangerous" are valuable whether your interest is in collaborating with developers or becoming a developer yourself. No matter what your goals are, level up in your current job, start a new career, or even start your own company, "Learn Enough HTML, CSS, and Layout" will help get you where you want to go. To get you there as quickly as possible, throughout the tutorial, we'll focus on the most important aspects of the subject, grounded in the philosophy that you don't have to learn everything to get started, you just have to learn enough to be dangerous. Part 1, also known as "Learn Enough HTML to Be Dangerous" is an introduction to HyperText Markup Language, the language of the World Wide Web. Every time you visit a website, the site's web server sends HTML to your browser which then renders it as the webpage you see on your screen. Because this process is universal, anyone who works with web technologies, which these days means virtually all developers, designers, and even many managers can benefit from knowing the basics of what HTML is and how it works. Also, you won't just be making a couple of test pages to sit on your computer. Right from the beginning, you'll publish your work to the live internet. <v ->Part 2, also known as</v> "Learn Enough CSS and Layout to be Dangerous" builds on the simple styling techniques introduced at the end of Part 1 to cover both web design with Cascading Style Sheets and also front-end web development with a static site generator. Many CSS tutorials teach the subject in isolation, just showing you how some element works on a page or how to use some specific style to make changes like text color or font size, but they don't show you how to put everything together as an integrated whole. To really understand HTML and CSS, you need to see how it all fits together into a system that allows you to modularly structure an entire website. And in this tutorial, you'll see what we mean when we teach you how to use a simple templating system called Jekyll. Using templates with a static site generator ensures that different parts of the page can be snapped together to make complete pages without needing to copy and paste identical code into a bunch of different documents. <v ->In addition to teaching you specific skills,</v> "Learn Enough HTML, CSS, and Layout" also helps you develop technical sophistication, the seemingly magical ability to solve practically any technical problem yourself. Technical sophistication includes concrete skills like version-control and HTML as well as fuzzier skills like googling the error message and knowing when to just reboot the darn thing. Throughout "Learn Enough HTML, CSS, and Layout" we'll have abundant opportunities to develop technical sophistication in the context of real-world examples. Although the individual parts of "Learn Enough HTML, CSS, and Layout to Be Dangerous" are as self-contained as possible, they also show you how the different tools fit together. You'll learn how to use CSS to style your HTML elements into a flexible multi-column layout, use a static site generator to put the same element on every page without repeating any code, and then deploy your site to the live web using a custom domain of your choice. The result is an integrated introduction to the foundations of front-end web development that's practically impossible to find anywhere else.