Let's Get Started

Hello, and welcome to my Absolute Beginner course 🥳

Before we get started, I just wanted to point out some key aspects to the lessons:

Most lessons have video and written content. These compliment each other as the videos are meant to be brief and the written content is meant be more detailed.
In the lessons, key concepts will stand out with a special graphic.
At the end of each lesson is a way to track your progress. It's optional, but if you set it to "I Know This", it will help you see what progress you've made when reviewing all lessons.
If you want, you can take the optional quiz at the end of most lessons. The purpose is to help you gauge whether or now you understood the main concepts.

Enjoy the course...
Brad Westfall

This is the very first lesson of the very first course we have at CSSBootcamp.com. To give you some background on me, my name is Brad Westfall and I've been doing web development for about 20 years at the time of this writing. In that time I've found that I absolutely love teaching this stuff and for whatever reason I can't explain, I love teaching beginner concepts as much as I do advanced ones.

In 2014 I helped to start the first coder bootcamp in the state of Arizona where I live. Three instructors including myself designed all the curriculum in just a few weeks for the first co-hort. We made mistakes and constantly re-invented everything to get better. Even though the content was really good by the time the second co-hort ended, we never stopped wanting to make even more improvements and I can remember that even after two years our material was getting just as many updates as it was when we first started. There's always room to get better.

I learned a lot about teaching.

I'm excited now to share with you a curriculum that embodies the same quality of material that you would get from any expensive in-person bootcamp. There are some pros and cons of doing this sort of thing online though. One the one hand, you're responsible for your own time. You need to drive yourself to keep pushing all the time. The average bootcamp student spends 40 hours per week in the class and then a bunch of hours doing homework related stuff as well. Maybe that doesn't work for your schedule or your budget. The pro of doing this type of online material is that it's on your time, at your pace. Just find your strength to keep going and consistency and practice are they keys to your success.

In these first few lessons, we're going to be covering the setup of your computer and some pre-requisite knowledge for becoming a web developer.