Young Developers

[georgearnall]

Just curious if there is any other young developers out there? I am 14 and live in the UK, I really enjoy working and building frontend websites. I have quite a solid base in HTML and CSS.

[My website](http://thecreativedigital.com “My website”) (when it’s finished :P) I also have a reseller account which is hosting a few websites for family and some clients.

[Andy Howells]

I think htmlmaniac is a younger guy. Galen Gidman (not sure if he’s on here) would also be a great guy for you to speak to, he runs a podcast called “Young Guns” – he’s started developing at 13 (17 now) and is a really impressive guy, the podcast is great and he talked to The East Wing a while back.

But hey the rest of us aren’t super ancient or anything – I’m only 26! (Now I feel old!).

Anyway – my only advice is this, KEEP AT IT. I started developing when I was exactly your age, at the time I was using a bootlegged copy of Dreamweaver MX. Best thing I ever did was keep at it, it’s a skill you can always come back to and it never ceases to be super exciting.

Good luck with your site and client work, keep at it, keep learning and don’t be afraid to make mistakes – the best way to learn design and development is problem solving. Make a mistake, learn to fix it and you’ll get there. For times when you get stuck on anything difficult, give us a shout on here and we’ll be more than happy to help.

[georgearnall]

Thanks for the advice, I am definitely going to stick at this stuff!

I had a quick look at the podcast and sounds interesting so I am probably going to start listening in on that one.

I have quite a few relatives who know people who want sites so I am not short of clients to practise building and finding problems.

I would really like to learn jQuery, do you have any tips on how to get started with that ? I have looked at a few short tutorials and understand the very basics but haven’t had chance to play with it much so I don’t have much of a understanding of any of the commands.

[Watson90]

Hi @georgearnall

A great way to learn something new is signing up at http://codecademy.com – I recently signed up and started learning JavaScript. It’s so interactive and helpful.

I would recommend learning a solid base of JS and then move onto jQuery. With the JS knowledge you’ll be able to delve more into jQuery seen as though you’ll be comfortable with the syntax.

Good luck man.

[georgearnall]

Thanks, that looks like a great site to learn from.

Is this free, or is there a catch because from what I saw you didn’t have to pay for anything? I am surprised something this good would be given away for nothing.

[Nile]

CodeAcademy doesn’t seem, to me, a great place to start learning a new programming language. It may gave you a little grip, but it doesn’t teach you any context at all and when it comes down to actually creating something, you’ll be lost. I suggest running around on forums, tutorial sites (besides w3schools), and videos. That isn’t to say that you shouldn’t use CodeAcademy, but you should be aware that the basics that they teach you don’t really mean anything.

If you do decide to go the CodeAcademy path (which isn’t a bad choice), start [here](http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/javascript-original).

Once you have a pretty basic grasp on Javascript, check out some of [these](http://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/17/conversation/learn-javascript-videos) videos. Don’t overlook them just because they’re long.

[georgearnall]

Thank you for your opinion, I think that I will use CodeAcademy for the time being so that I have an idea of some of the syntax and commands unless I find something else that is better. This doesn’t mean I won’t look at tutorials and other sites as these have saved me lots of times for problems in the past.

I have already completed the first section of the Javascript tutorials and it taught me some interesting basics to Javascript.

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