Formerly, I have worked with programming of applications rather than websites, so creating a webste as the first assignment was a bit differnet for me. In order to learn website desing, I set out searching the web for different tutorials on HTML and CSS, and found several useful resources.
Generally I do not look to books in this day and age for information extensively, however one book which I found to be especially helpful in this process was HTML & CSS Design and Build Websites by Jon Duckett. This books was made several years back, but it provides a very good overview of how to get started with web design and the languages used therein, HTML and CSS. There is also a companion book that was just released this year by the same author called Javascript & JQuery Interactive Front End Web Development. This book covers the Javascript side of web development and provides an overview of how one makes websites dynamic and respond to Javascript method calls.
I found that in starting programming it could be hard to find a suitable coding envirnment. While it is possible to write code in a plain text file, doing so provides an experience which lacks many of the benefits which can be gained from using a script editor. Below are some free options which I found that can be utilized when trying to learn and develop skills with HTML programming.
This is an application which can be linked to Google Drive. Doing so allows you to edit and recieve a live preview of .html files you are working on. This can be especially useful if you are working with HTML, CSS, and Javascript for the first time. I have found that while editing code, it is helpful to have a live preview as well as error catching, and this addon allows for just that in a convenient manner which can be accessed for (almost) any web browser. To use it, you need only create a free gmail account and in the ‘Drive’ section you can try and open a .html file. Once you do, Google Drive will give you a list of applications which you can link to your drive to open the file, and HTML Editey will be one of them. Once you go through the steps to lnk it to your drive, the app will be available to open all your .html files in the future.
Textmate version one required a purchase to use, however Textmate 2 has been open-sourced and is free to download. This is a free offline text editor which provides syntax hilighting as well as compilation for a wide range of programming languages. This program is useful in working with files, especially as code (at least in my opinion) tends to look better and be more readable with syntax detection and highlighting, and using tools that provide this can take a bit off the learning curve as associations between code and what it is actually performing can be made faster.
Beckett Dunning - 2015