Frontend Developer Skills

Have you ever wondered when you are visiting your favorite website why it is laid out the way it is. How it is so eye-catching and stunning. The way buttons act when you click on it and filtering things by search on website. Have you ever thought, “I wish I could do that”? Well, these features are built through front-end development.

What is Front End Development ?

How the user shows a website, the way he/she interact. Let’s say, you are gonna shopping online. Now you will go to your favorite shopping website and search for what you want to buy. You get the results only related to your search. You also may sort results according to brand or the latest product available. When you like something and add it to cart, it is saved in the cart. All this stuff is called Front End Development. Responsive website (it looks according to screen size — mobile phone or desktop) is also a part of Front End Development.

Now, we’ve got that out of the way, let’s thrive deep into it.

Table of Contents :

1. Key Skills required

• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript
• jQuery

2. HTML

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. It was introduced by Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist, and inventor of the World Wide Web. Though it contains ‘Language’ in its name, it is not a programming language. It is a markup language which means what will be the content on web page. The code used in formatting the text is called ‘Tags’. It is the backbone of the web page. With the HTML, one can make static web pages only, not dynamic. Here content on web page can be paragraphs, tables, forms, links, images or any other representations. The latest version of HTML is HTML5 and it was published on October 28, 2014.

3. CSS

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet. HTML doesn’t define how the content will be presented on web page. CSS was developed to present the content on web page. As the name suggests, it is used to style the web page. One can have a unique look of the site the way he/she wants. The latest version of CSS is CSS3.

4. Bootstrap

Bootstrap is an HTML, CSS and JS framework to design websites faster and easier. It reduces codes. It has built-in classes to make the website responsive. One doesn’t need to write excessive lines of CSS. For example, if you want to divide a page into three columns equally, you have to write number of lines in CSS. With bootstrap, it can be done easily just by using built-in classes.

5. JavaScript

JavaScript is the programming language to make the web page dynamic. It is a client-side language. It uses the Document Object Model (DOM) to manipulate the web page in response to the events/user input. It defines the behavior of the web page.

Using the technique called AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), one can get, post, update and delete data without reloading the page. As the name says, it allows web pages to be updated asynchronously. With AJAX, it is possible to update the part of a web page without refreshing whole page.

6. jQuery

It is a JavaScript library. It was designed to simplify HTML DOM, event handling, CSS animation, and AJAX. It was invented by John Resig. It was first released in January 2006. As we all know, a library has some predefined functions that we can use directly in our programming. We just need to include that library in which the function is defined. Here is the same thing. It includes predefined functions. For example, for animation, it has the function ‘.animate()’. One doesn’t need to write lines of code (CSS) for animation.

One of the drawbacks of jQuery is it has very complex syntax. One needs to have inordinate practice of jQuery to remember the syntax.

7. React.js

It is an open-source JavaScript library to build user interfaces. It is a component-based library. It is created by Facebook. It creates a virtual DOM in memory. First, it does all the necessary manipulation in virtual DOM before doing in the browser’s DOM. It is used for view layer of web/mobile applications. It corresponds to ‘view’ in the MVC application design model.

8. AngularJS

It is an open-source JavaScript framework for dynamic web applications. It is the superset of JavaScript . It allows extending HTML’s syntax to express application clearly. It reduces the amount of JavaScript needed to make a web application. It enables the creation of reactive Single Page Applications (SPAs). This framework is regularly updated by the angular team of Google.

There is much more when it comes to front-end development. Like Node.js (JavaScript runtime), VBScript, Express.js, etc.

To recapitulate, there are a number of languages and frameworks for front-end development. Selection of language and framework depends on the needs have in application and as per convenience of the developer.