5.1 You’re a front-end developer - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v Michael>As we mentioned in the introduction,</v> CSS is not the kind of language you can learn in little half-steps. You really have to put everything together. And so that's the purpose of this tutorial. But you do have to know a lot of details. So this is the kind of thing where the intent of this tutorial is to complement some of the more detailed resources out there. And so, Lee, when you're developing CSS, my guess is that you have to look up stuff all the time. <v Lee>Right, there's no shame</v> in having to use some sort of online resource to look up just, you know, whether it's a value that you have to give something or just how something works. There's too many CSS rules and declarations out there for anyone to remember all of them, so online resources are a huge aid. <v Michael>Right, so you can think of this tutorial</v> as giving you the broader narrative context of starting a website and completing it and deploying it to the live web. But the details which we introduce in the tutorial are the kinds of things that you don't have to know off the top of your head. Pretty much everyone looks stuff up as they go along. Now one aspect of this broader context that we're talking about involves understanding the various parts of a website beyond just the appearance on the page. So that includes things like the user interface design, user experience and so on. And these are all aspects of what's known as front-end development. We think of ourselves not just as designers, but as developing this interface for the user. So Lee, this is something I know that you've been doing for a while. It's not just design, right? You think of yourself as really having like a broader skill set than that. <v Lee>Right, it's programming,</v> and it's also understanding how pages get built in the background. Once you move beyond the purely static HTML page, once you're using a framework or static site generator, you really do have to understand how things come together. And when you're a front-end developer, all of these things are different aspects that you have to load in your mind so that you're always thinking modularly. Bits come in, bits come out, and they all get built into a single page. And so you don't want your designs and styles to conflict with other stuff on the page. So it's a much more complicated skillset than just knowing how to do some design and knowing how to change some colors. It's also more valuable to anyone out there who might be looking to get a job doing this down the road, being able to fully understand how the front of a web application works is an incredibly valuable asset and high-paying job.