Part of the purpose of writing this is not HTML per se (note that it is in the /learning-philosophy section of this wiki and not /lang/html for a reason). It is a general philosophy of learning
(one that I take), where your notes form a 'cache' of knowledge which saves you from hunting
around books and the web time and again. As such, it applies to learning many things, it's just
that HTML and web coding is the particular arena in which this guide takes place.
I've also added a 'resources' section at the bottom with other useful links.
The General Approach
Start with
- https://www.w3schools.com/html/ and
- https://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp and then
- https://www.w3schools.com/js/default.asp to complete the set.
Assemble a cheat sheet which is (collection of) valid html file(s) which illustrate all the tags, their usage, and attributes. Then do one (or some) which illustrates CSS properties. Add to them as you learn stuff. So you have working notes that serve as examples.
Importantly, when taking notes, the principle you adopt is:
- If you don't know, look in your notes;
- If not in your notes, look it up, research, etc.;
- If you look it up, or research it, put it in your notes;
- then when doing, use only your notes and memory.
That way you force yourself to take good notes. If you didn't write it down, then when you forget it, and you will forget a lot, you'll have to spend ages googling it again, and then the sources you found last time may no longer be there.
Get Obsidian, or a personal wiki. (I wrote this, my own personal wiki in PHP on the server and JS on the client, with a few Python scripts on the server for admin and indexing.) This is where I dump all my notes I'm happy to share, and elsewhere I have private ones for stuff I don't want to share yet, and since the source is just basically Markdown files, it is easy to move pages between wikis. It made a good learning project, and serves as a pile of code examples for doing stuff.
Learn how to learn, how to take good notes, how to find things by googling, or by inspecting the innards of websites using the dev tools. Work on your workflow. Choose a good text editor and make it second nature. (I use vim and neovim primarily, sometimes VS code, and occasionally Visual Studio).
Nobody can do this for you. If you do find someone to teach you, then take it upon yourself to get as much out of any contact time you can get. Do as much homework between times, take each morsel of knowledge and treasure it as if it cost a week's wages, and make yourself get every last drop of learning out of every drop of teaching you get. Treat your teacher's time as priceless. If you need to be told something twice, then something has gone wrong with your note taking. If you have to be told something three times, you are wasting your teacher's time. That is the sort of attitude to take to learning.
Master that attitude, develop your thirst for knowledge, technique, understanding, and such. And that attitude will serve you well. But being spoon-fed does nobody any good. If you want to do web coding in practice, you must learn to search, research, problem solve, take notes, and such. Eventually even the most spoon-fed dev must get beyond what they have been spoon-fed. You can follow a project on Codecademy and get some standardised student workpiece to put in your portfolio, but an employer doesn't want that standard workpiece, and so its down to the actual understanding and knowledge you've acquired.