Good news: you don't need expensive courses to become a web developer. Everything you need is available for free — the only question is what to pick and in what order. Here are the resources we recommend again and again.
Foundations: three resources are enough
Don't scatter yourself across ten platforms. These three cover everything:
- freeCodeCamp — an interactive path from zero to full projects, with certificates.
- The Odin Project — a complete curriculum with real projects and Git from day one.
- MDN Web Docs — the best reference for HTML, CSS and JavaScript; look up answers here, not in the first Google result.
Practice: where to train every day
Frontend Mentor gives you real designs to turn into code — exactly what developers do daily. Codewars and Exercism train programming thinking with small challenges. And the best exercise is still building a simplified clone of a site you use yourself.
Tools to set up on day one
VS Code as your editor, Git plus a GitHub account for version control, and the browser dev tools (F12) — these three are enough for your first six months. Don't worry about the "right" configuration; the defaults are perfectly fine.
A simple 90-day plan
If you can commit ~10 hours a week:
- Days 1–30: HTML and CSS — build and publish your personal site.
- Days 31–60: JavaScript basics — add interactivity, build a small tool (calculator, todo app).
- Days 61–90: first project using API data + everything on GitHub — that is the start of a portfolio.
Don't learn alone
Join a community — Discord servers (freeCodeCamp, The Odin Project), local meetups and open-source projects on GitHub. Asking questions and reading other people's code accelerates learning more than any course.