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Comment by nfriedly | Hacker News Reader

To a large extent, you just need to pick something and try it out. Start small, build something with react (or whatever). If you like it, great, maybe build something else with it. If you didn't like it or got hopelessly stuck, try something else.

I don't have the link now, but there was some one who made one website a day for 30 days to learn different techniques and also just to get in the habbit of shipping something. That might be one way to go.

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I appreciate your advice, but at the same time I don't just want to learn to code for the sake of learning to code. I have specific goals and ideas but I'm not in a place where I can achieve them.

I should've been more specific in my post that I'm trying to learn what "technologies" (not my favourite word) are going to be most relevant/useful to spend time learning.

I'd worry less about specific technologies and more about learning the basics of building of a web app. It doesn't really matter what you use. Successful sites have been built using pretty much all languages. When I taught myself programming about 16 years ago, I bought a book on Cold Fusion that had step-by-step chapters on building a CRUD app, I used MS Access as the database, and did basic JavaScript for validation. If I was doing the same today, I'd use PHP, PostgreSQL and JQuery. The concept is the same. Learn how to create, read, update and delete records from a relational database via a web front end. Learn how to loop over records and display them. You've got to walk before you can run.

That's actually what I'm looking for. I want to learn:

- "the basics of building of a web app" - "how to create, read, update and delete records from a relational database via a web front end" - etc.

The problem is that you can find so many tutorials or books, etc. on specific things like Rails, JavaScript, or MongoDB but I don't know of anything for the actual underlying thought to using those.

I don't know enough information to be able to choose what I should look at using.

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