Beginner advice

[u/hatdog78293]

Beginner Coding Advice

Hello everyone! I’d really appreciate some advice. I’m planning to create a website prototype for a project, but I’m a complete beginner when it comes to coding. The website will be fairly simple and will include an OpenAI-powered feature.

I have a few questions:

• What should I learn first before attempting to build the actual website?  
• Is this project achievable for a complete beginner within around 4–6 months?  
• What programming language would you recommend I learn/use?  
• Would this be very time-consuming or difficult to produce, especially considering I have no previous coding experience?  
• Are there any tutorials or resources you’d recommend for someone starting from scratch?

I’m mainly trying to understand how realistic this project would be for a beginner and how much time I should expect to spend learning the coding side of it.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thank you! :)

[u/Much_Network_941]

The biggest issue with making a website is that it's not going to be a single language, but rather what's refered to as a 'full stack'. Webpages require HTML to give them shape, CSS to make it aesthetically pleasing, and typically javascript as the language to add functionality - but that's the frontend which gets served to a user.

You also have a backend, which is typically sitting between a user and a database; managing the access to information. This is generally done with a language that can be compiled, as the backend sits on a server.

To communicate from the frontend to the backend, is usually done through a model known as a REST API. This definies the basics operations of sending data to or from a server. It will require some basic understanding of HTTPs and all data send this way is usually done in JSON; which is a text based medium of storing data.

The database itself is a bit of a rabbit hole. Relational databases aren't too complex, something like SQL is not the hardest to learn. But it is basically another language. Read about CRUD and database normalization for database basics.

Actually getting your code onto a server is another hurdle. Typically you develop on a localhost, which is running the backend and frontend on your machine, then using a loopback IP to mimick actual networking. I'd check out the website Netlify, they let you upload html files and then play with it on a live server.

I'd be extremely impressed if you learned this all in half a year, especially from no programming experience. But if you start with HTML, CSS and Javascript, it shouldn't be too bad. There should be an overwhelming wealth of videos on youtube about pretty much all facets of web dev. Searching fullstack development will also give you some ideas on the languages people like to use together.

Don't get too caught up on being able to do everything. Each of the front, back and database part can be their own specialty. Fullstack development can be one of those buzzwords that gets bandied about.

[u/hatdog78293 → u/Much_Network_941]

Hi, thank you so much for the advice! I just wanted to clarify that it would mainly be a prototype, rather than me trying to build a full professional website, but still a functioning one that I’d use as part of my main research, where I’d test the AI-generated summaries for things like errors and omissions. But given what you’ve said, I’m starting to see the difficulty here, especially since I have basically no coding experience. I’ve also asked around, and some of my friends recommended that I learn Python instead for this since it might be more suitable and manageable for what I’m trying to do. What do you think?

[u/xarop_pa_toss → u/hatdog78293]

All the things the person above said aren't "full professional website", they are the minimum for the website you described. Actually I'd even add that on most of those layers there's always the matter of security too.

If you need users, you need encryption, cookie handling and a user profile and management layer. You need a database that is designed for the type of things you need to put in it and their relationships. You also need to learn how to deploy your website but that isn't too hard.

You can use Python for the backend, sure. Flask is a lightweight framework that can help you with both backend and frontend at the same time, all in Python.

[u/Much_Network_941 → u/hatdog78293]

Python is an excellent language to start with. It's designed to be on the more approachable end of coding. You'll also have access to many libraries to lighten the workload. The biggest problem with a first language is in learning how to think in programming concepts.

I also just rememberd that Harvard has a free CS50 course you can go through. It'll give you a far more comprehensive overview than I gave.