Essential Tools For Frontend Web Development

What is a Front End Developer?

A front-end developer is a type of computer programmer that codes and creates the visual front-end elements of software, application or website. He or she creates computing components/features that are directly viewable and accessible by the end user or client.
Front-end web development, also famous as client-side development is the practice of producing HTML, CSS and JavaScript for a website or Web Application so that a user can see and interact with them directly. The challenge associated with front end development is that the tools and techniques used to create the front end of a website change constantly and so the developer needs to constantly be aware of how the field is developing.

 

Essential Tools For Frontend Web Development

Web development tools have come to an extended method in a few short years. We can connect the power of extremely tested libraries to improve our workflow and advantage from better options when it comes to responsive design. Not only that, we can build things together thanks to ever-improving version control systems. From browser add-ons and plugins to processors that streamline your code, there have never been more possibilities for creating awesome web applications.
These are all relations that will become super familiar to you as you start learning tech skills, but to ease you in. To help you out, we’ve created a list of essential tools for frontend development to get you started.

Sublime Text
A first-rate code editor – one that features a well-designed, super well-organized, and extreme swift user interface. There are several that do this well, but arguably the best and most popular is Sublime Text.
Craftily run by a one-man development team, the secret to sublime’s achievement lies in the program’s huge collection of keyboard shortcuts – such as the capacity to perform simultaneous editing (making the same interactive changes to many selected areas) as well as speedy navigation to files, symbols, and lines. And when you’re spending 8+ hours with your editor each day, those precious few seconds saved for each process really do add up…

Chrome Developer Tools
Wouldn’t it be great if you could edit your HTML and CSS in real-time, or debug your JavaScript, all while viewing a thorough performance analysis of your website?
Google’s built-in Chrome Developer Tools let you do just that. Bundled and available in both Chrome and Safari, they allow developers access into the internals of their web application. On top of this, a palette of network tools can help optimize your loading flows, while a timeline gives you a deeper understanding of what the browser is doing at any given moment.

jQuery
JavaScript has long been considered an essential front-end language by developers, while it’s not without its problems: riddled with browser inconsistencies, its rather complicated and unfriendly syntax meant that functionality often suffered.
That was until 2006 when jQuery – a fast, small, cross-platform JavaScript library aimed at simplifying the front-end process – appeared on the section. By abstracting a lot of the functionality usually left for developers to solve on their own, jQuery allowed the better possibility for creating animations, adding plug-ins, or even just navigating documents.
And it’s clearly successful – jQuery was by far the most popular JavaScript library in existence in 2015, with installation on 65% of the top 10 million highest-trafficked sites on the Web.

GitHub
It’s each developer’s best nightmare – you’re working on a new project feature and you screw up. Enter version control systems (VCS) – and more specifically, GitHub.
By developing out your project with the facility, you can view any changes you’ve made or even go back to your previous state (making pesky mistakes a thing of the past). The repository hosting service also boasts a rich open-source development community (making collaboration between teams as easy as pie), as well as long as several other components such as bug tracking, feature requests, task management, and wikis for every project.
Many employers will look for finely honed Git skills, so now’s the perfect time to sign up – plus it’s a great way to get involved and learn from the best with a wide array of open-source projects to work on.

Twitter Bootstrap
Receiving tired of typing in that same designing for a container? How about that button that keeps cropping up? Once you start building front-end applications frequently, you’ll start to notice the same decorations developing.
UI (User interface) frameworks are an effort to solve these problems by extracting the common elements into reusable modules – meaning developers can support the elements of new applications with speed and ease.
The most widely used of these frameworks is Bootstrap, an inclusive UI package developed by the team at Twitter. Complete with tools to regularise stylesheets, build modal objects, add JavaScript plugins, and a plethora of other features, Bootstrap can dramatically cut down on the amount of code and time needed to build your project.

Angular.js
HTML is typically the foundation of any frontend developer’s toolbox, but it has what many perceive to be a serious flaw: it wasn’t designed to manage dynamic views.

This is where AngularJS, an open-source web application framework, comes in. Developed by Google, AngularJS lets you spread your application’s HTML syntax, resulting in a more expressive, readable, and quick to develop an environment that would otherwise not have been built with HTML alone.
The project is not without its critics: some feel that this sort of data binding makes for messy, non-separated code, but we still think it’s an invaluable skill to have in your front-end kit.

Sass
Web dev tools that save time are your best friend and one of the first things you’ll learn about code is that it needs to be DRY (“Don’t Repeat Yourself”). The second thing you’ll possibly learn is that CSS is typically not very DRY.
Enter the world of the CSS pre-processor, a tool that will help you write maintainable, future-proof code, all while dropping the amount of CSS you have to write (keeping it DRY).
Possibly most popular among them is Sass, an eight-year-old open-source project which pretty much defined the genre of modern CSS preprocessors. While a little tricky to get to grips with initially, Sass’s combination of variables, nesting, and mixins will render simple CSS when compiled, meaning your stylesheets will be more readable and (most importantly) DRY.