1. On Memorization
  2. Documentation
  3. Recommended Tutorial
  4. Recommended References
  5. Web Design Concepts

Docs

On Memorization

DO NOT TRY TO MEMORIZE all of the HTML and CSS properties. There is just too much for any sane human to effectively memorize, and even if you did, new features are being added all the time.

So what should you do instead? Well, learn the main concepts and get used to doing research and looking up the specifics when you need them. Find references, tutorials, and other materials that work for you (I’m trying to provide some good starting points) and keep those close at hand when coding.

Have people that you can ask when you get stuck. Hopefully I’m on that list. :)

Personally I’m a huge fan of using examples to learn concepts. While reading references is great to get the isolated details about a specific topic, examples pull together multiple topics so you can see how larger goals are actually accomplished.

Please DO work with classmates and practice examples during the lecture. That way, if you can’t get it to work, you can immediately ask me what’s going on during the lecture.

Documentation

There are four types of documentation. Knowing how to read them is important otherwise we will waste inordinate amounts of time or get completely lost.

  1. Tutorials: A step-by-step lesson that gets a beginner doing something with your project.
  2. How-to guides: A guide on how to solve a specific problem.
  3. Explanations: deep dives into a particular topic.
  4. Reference: clear, dry technical descriptions.

We’ll be focusing on 1 and 4, tutorials and references. I recommend the following:

I strongly encourage you to at least take a look at HTML & CSS Is Hard (But it doesn’t have to be), A friendly web development tutorial for complete beginners. Especially the following sections:

Once you have read the above, or if you already have some experience with HTML and CSS, the CSS Reference from Codrops is a great way to refresh your memory on all of the many options available.

Also DevDocs is a fantastic, fast-searchable way to find documentation for many different programming languages and tools, including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Web Design Concepts

The excellent article Whitespace from A List Apart will help you make your signature and sites more readable as well as looking much more professional.