The early ages of web era mainly consisted of webpages of text and links. At that time,Netscape was the still dominant of web browser market. As a web developer, you could develop web apps(or better to call web pages) easily with knowledge of HTML only. But with the evolution of web, new technologies came out, we can see more robust web apps around us everywhere. Today as a web developer, the ability to run and configure a web server and edit HTML to create some simple web pages has lost almost all of its value, you need to equip yourself with lots of different technologies such as HTML5,CSS3 and JavaScript etc.
The real thing a web developer needs to do now is knows how to build and support web applications with teams. As technologies evolves dramatically and it's no more the age of heroes with one single person. Here are some advice for contemporary web developers from Michael Wolfe .
- Don't use the term "webmaster". The kids will just look at you with a blank stare.
- Get a thorough re-education in CSS and go through the most commonly used frameworks (Foundation, Bootstrap, YUI).
- Go through Nicole Sullivan's OOCSS lectures and libraries. It will change the way you use CSS.
- Learn HTML5 and study up on the differences between IE, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, both on the desktop and on iOS/Android browsers.
- Relearn JavaScript. Learn JQuery inside and out.
- Learn one or more of Ruby/Rails, Python, PHP, and/or NodeJS.
- Learn about JavaScript client MVC frameworks like Backbone.
- Get a GitHub account and go through and deconstruct as many projects as you can.
- Take 100 quality consumer internet sites and deconstruct them. Look at their use of CSS and JavaScript and 3rd party libraries in particular.
- Understand the commonly-used content management frameworks like Drupal and Wordpress as well as build-a-website services like Wix, Weebly, and Webs.
- Learn about AWS, Heroku, Rackspace, and other hosting options. You should almost never need to touch a server.
- Learn Photoshop or Fireworks.
- Learn to fully-utilize browsers' debug tools like FireBug, Chrome Developer Tools, IE Developer Tools, etc... this will make development 1000x easier.
From above advice list, you can easily find how much you need to know to be a full fledged web developer. Apparently if you just want to be a backend or fontend developer only, then you need to put more effort on the relative topics. However, it's always a good add-on if you can know about some other areas as well.
