This is in continuation with the Part 1 of the blog.
In the last article, we discussed mainly the scope of the web dev and knowing about various jargon related to it. This article will focus sharply on tools and steps to start the web development journey. With the rise of the Internet, the developer is gaining decent shape and size (the more, the better), thanks to this advancement we have plenty of tools for exploration. Here we look at them:
Instead of giving a list of tools, we will focus a set of tools that can help ( the idea is simple, instead of listing array of tools , we'll pick the best ones used by majority of community and the best part they are cross platform (can run on different OS based on your appetite).
The editor are used to write the code, this is part where coder will spent their significant time in order to build the application/product. Here we use VS Code as text editor and here are some to justify:
Features: Be it Debugger or Quick Find and Replace the biggest advantage of using VS Code is those quick customising features that it provides with easy to use interface.
Useful Extension for VS Code: There are so so many useful extension that exist for Web devs inside VS Code that makes it programming experience. Some of them are:
These are the ones you can start with and later explore more extension as per your taste.
It is software that helps in tracking the changes made to the files ( Code, documentation, etc.). To understand the need of it, let's take a real-life example, say you work in a tech giant organization like Google where your project team comprises of 50-100 programmers (senior, associate level, intern).
Now everyone will contribute to the code by writing documentation or modifying code in production, it becomes very necessary to know who made/requested the change in the existing files and how much (be it adding or deleting the files in production). That's where we realize the version control system keeps track of all the changes made in the past or now. For understanding better, I took the example of google but in reality, even for a small company of size, it is important for them to use a Version control system. Some popular VCS are:
For now we will stick to Git ( for starters we use Github ( git is a command line tool , a bit complex for newbies , Github is git repository hosting service which is Graphical user interface of Git hence easy to use)).
Documentation: (here we are defining documentation regarding programming language, the documentation itself can be of various types depending on the need of it) It is a written piece of text with all sorts of information related to that programming language. For programmers, a reliable source of information should exist all-time for taking reference. It helps them to use appropriate functionalities at the various place (programming languages contain an array of methods and their uses, they can't remember everything 🤣).
The importance of documentation can be observed from the fact that Devs frequently revisit the documentations during code reviews (good senior devs always encourage & (in my case our mentor, Tanay Partap) emphasize young devs to read about it regularly). It's true reading them is not interesting at first but helps in the longer term in the project (better working, maintenance). For starters the recommended documentation is **MDN.**