This is a post by Eric Weinstein, creator of many Codecademy courses and a current student at Hacker School.
There’s a lot to learn when it comes to coding. How do you know where to start? Should you learn HTML or JavaScript? What’s the difference between Python and Ruby? What are “client-side” and “server-side” languages, “front end” and “back end” and how are they different? Hopefully this quick post will help you choose the language best suited for what you want to do.
To edit webpages
If you’re interested in creating a static website or a single webpage, you should start with Web Fundamentals of HTML and CSS. HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and describes the structure of webpages. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, and controls their appearance — for example, the font color or the position of text on the page.
To make them interactive
If you want to give your website behavior—think automatic Twitter updates, your Facebook notifications, or the ability to drag and drop elements of your LinkedIn profile—then you’ll want to learn JavaScript and jQuery. JavaScript is a frontend, or “client-side” language which means it runs on the web browser of the person visiting your site. jQuery is a library of specific JavaScript tools designed to make website interaction more awesome.
To store user information
If you want to develop a full-blown web app that lets users log in and saves information for them (such as tweets, Facebook posts, or Codecademy badges), you’ll want to learn a backend, or “server-side” language like PHP, Python, Ruby or JavaScript (it’s ambidextrous). These languages run on the computer where the website code lives, also called the server. You can accomplish the same things and build the same kinds of projects with each of them, so go ahead and pick your favorite!
Which language will you start with?