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I often get asked what resources I’d recommend for someone totally new to making websites. There are surprisingly few tutorials out there aimed at the complete beginner. There’s Jon Duckett’s excellent—and beautiful—book. There’s the Codebar curriculum (which I keep meaning to edit and update; it’s all on Github).

Now there’s a new resource by Damian Wielgosik called How to Code in HTML5 and CSS3. Personally, I would drop the “5” and the “3”, but that’s a minor quibble; this is a great book. It manages to introduce concepts in a logical, understandable way.

And it’s free.

Why we teach our students progressive enhancement | Blog Cyd Stumpel

Progressive enhancement is about building something robust, that works everywhere, and then making it better where possible.

Let’s reinvent the wheel ⚒ Nerd

Vasilis gives the gist of his excellent talk at the border:none event that just wrapped up in Nuremberg. The rant at the end chimed very much with my feelings on this topic:

I showed a little interaction experiment that one of my students made, with incredible attention to detail. Absolutely brilliant in so many ways. You would expect that all design agencies would be fighting to get someone like that into their design team. But to my amazement she now works as a react native developer.

I have more of these very talented, very creative designers who know how to code, who really understand how the web works, who can actually design things for the web, with the web as a medium, who understand the invisible details, who know about the UX of HTML, who know what’s possible with modern HTML and CSS. Yet when they start working they have to choose: you either join our design team and are forced to use a tool that doesn’t get it, or you join the development team and are forced to use a ridiculous framework and make crap.

An Interactive Guide to Flexbox in CSS

This is a superb explanation of flexbox—the interactive widgets sprinkled throughout are such a great aid to learning!

Lean Web Club

New from Mr. Vanilla JS himself, Chris Ferdinandi:

A learning space for people who hate the complexity of modern web development.

It’ll be $29 a month or $299 a year (giving you two months worth for free).

Designing Beautiful Shadows in CSS

This is a great tutorial—I just love the interactive parts that really help make things click.