We recently brought on a new employee who expressed interest in beginning front-end development, but only had minimal knowledge of HTML and CSS. They’d been frustrated with the standard tutorials that attempted to explain each single tag, and weren’t interested in continuing. On a whim (but apparently good guess) I suggested they continue working with HTML but immediately include Twitter’s Bootstrap CSS Framework while learning and developing.
The result was astounding. In three weeks we turned a college student into a junior front-end developer.
We found that by simply having something look nice and working from an incredible example page with great documentation, the learning process went much smoother, faster, and resulted in higher-quality work. Now after just three weeks we have a new junior front-end developer who now does all of our prototyping and initial front-end builds with the expected level of incredible Vuurr quality.
Where to Start Learning
To get started with Bootstrap, use their guide here: https://getbootstrap.com/getting-started/
Sitepoint has a pretty good walkthrough of Bootstrap 3 as well: https://www.sitepoint.com/understanding-twitter-bootstrap-3/
Hi I am a designer but want to learn html/css and bootstrap. I used to know a novice amount of html and css years ago but wanted to ask is the above a tutorial or a statement? If not a tutorial any recommended ways to start? Onlines courses UCLA extension can be costly but I like the structure held accountable? Lynda.com good enough?
Hey Sean – thanks for commenting. I’ve updated the post with a couple links to check out for learning BS3. As far as other online resources – I believe there is enough free information out there that you shouldn’t need to pay for courses to learn it. If anything, learning to search for the information you need is more of a talent than learning the framework itself. Any issue you’ll have in the future – there’s almost always an answer if you know how to search for it. For that reason I say don’t pay for a course – there’s good info out there already. Once you learn the basics of the framework you’ll only have specific questions and for that you’ll find stackoverflow and similar sites are the most helpful, but again found by a well worded Google search.
Best of luck man. Cheers!