Hello Devs, If you want to become a frontend developer in 2022 and wondering what you should learn to become a professional web developer in 2022, but is not sure about which technologies, tools, framework, languages, and libraries to learn. Here are the essential skills you can learn to become a frontend developer in 2022. The list includes essential technologies, programming languages, tools, libraries, and frameworks.
This is the first and foremost thing anyone serious about web development should learn. It's probably the oldest web technology out there and also the first one
I learned long ago, but it's still relevant, and you just cannot become a Web Developer without a good knowledge of HTML. Technically it's a markup language and used
to specify the structure of your page.
Apart from HTML, if there is another irreplaceable web technology is then it must be CSS 3 or Cascading Style Sheet. CSS is used to style your web page, I mean to make it look more beautiful. You can also use CSS to specify the layout of the element.
Just like HTML, it's scarce now to style your web pages by writing CSS classes by hand, instead of many people and the team using a framework like Bootstrap, Tailwind CSS, Materialize, etc. Like HMTL, CSS is also evolving, and now you have things like Flexbox and Grid.
This is the third most essential thing any Web developer should learn; in fact, without JavaScript, the Web would not have been where it is today. When I learned JavaScript, people told me that it put life in your webpage, it can make your webpage interactive.
Like you can do things when someone clicks buttons, you can change animations and look and feel of your webpage when the user moves the mouse, etc. All those are still true, but JavaScript now offers much more. In fact, you can develop a complete web application end-to-end just using JavaScript.
As I have mentioned in the previous paragraph that Web Development, particularly frontend development, has come a long way in the last decade.
Now, you don't need to write HTML and CSS to create your webpages, like many other web developers and I have done in the late nineties and early 2000s.
Now, you have a framework like React, which can dynamically generate web pages for you. That's why a web developer needs to learn a frontend framework like React.
This is a no-brainer but again an essential thing to learn for Web developers. If you want to develop a website or web application, it must be responsive to cater to your audiences and customers accessing your site from different devices.
Responsive web design allows you to best present your website depending upon the size of the tools your users are using. I have seen many frontend developers not paying attention to this essential skill, don't be one of them, and learn Responsive web design.
Now that we have covered the most essential programming language and framework for frontend development, it's time to look at essential tools or web development, and first, one of them is NPM. If you don't know, now you don't need to write code for everything you need.
For example, if you want to generate dynamic web pages, you don't need to write a framework, someone else has already written, and you can just import them to use in your project.
All this was made possible because of NPM or Node Package Manager. It's the world's biggest software registry and hosts more than 800,000 code packages.
Technically, NPM is a package manager of the JavaScript programming language. It is also the default package manager of Node.js, which provides a JavaScript runtime environment for server-side development.
It consists of a command-line client called npm for downloading those modules and also hosts both public and private packages online.
This is another essential tool for Web Developers, particularly frontend developers. For a long time, I relied on the View Page Source option of Internet Explorer to figure out what's going on on a particular web page, it's an old story, but things have changed ever since Chrome took the market by storm in the last decade.
Now, almost 70% Web is browsed using Chrome. Many web developers don't know that Chrome has a built-in debugging tool, know as Chrome Developer Tool. You can access this by right-clicking and clicking on "Inspect."
This tool not only allows you to see raw HTML but also CSS, JavaScript libraries, and much more. You can even change the CSS classes on the fly and play with look and feel.
This is another absolutely must-know tool for Web Developers. Since today's Web world is a Web of APIs, you need a tool that can help you to explore APIs, and there is no better tool than Postman for interacting with APIs. You can use Postman to send HTTP requests, access APIs, check their response header, and do much more.
It doesn't matter if you connect to internal API or external APIs offered by Google, Facebook, Amazon, and many other payment gateways, Postman is essential for exploring and understanding them. It's also an excellent tool to test your own APIs.
As you know, most of the Web is driven by APIs, mainly REST APIs. One of the crucial jobs for a web developer is to either develop APIS as a backend developer or consumer those APIs as a frontend developer.
In both cases, you need to know how to interact with them. While REST is an easy and accessible way for developing APIS, it has some shortcomings for any practical web application like too many end-points to maintain and unwanted data to download and process.
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
Git is easy to learn and has a tiny footprint with lightning fast performance. It outclasses SCM tools like Subversion, CVS, Perforce, and ClearCase with features like cheap local branching, convenient staging areas, and multiple workflows.
What is Git? Why do we use it? Git and GitHub for Beginners!