What to Learn after HTML/CSS, JS

You’ve gotten your first taste of the fact that web development (not even just modern web development) inherently touches on a whole lot of different technologies, all of which come together to make a web app.

I’ll try to use the ones you mentioned to hopefully clear some of this stuff up.

PHP, Node, Ruby, etc. are examples of backend technologies. The backend is the part of a web app that runs your critical business logic, and delivers these to the frontend through either an API (more on this later) or directly rendering dynamic data into your HTML. Generally, you’ll only use one of these for a project, not all of them. Each of these also has frameworks to make developing real-world apps easier, such as Laravel for PHP, Express for Node, or Ruby on Rails for Ruby.

SQL is a database technology. You’ll want to have some sort of database if your app needs to keep track of a non-trivial amount of data. Relational databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MS SQL Server) are the ‘standard’ and most common type of database, and you use dialects of SQL to interact with these databases.

Angular, React, etc. are frontend JavaScript frameworks, which is what you want to use if your backend only exposes an API and doesn’t render any HTML. These frameworks allow you to create your interface entirely in the browser, based on data you get from your backend, which allows you to do a lot of neat things that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. Like on the backend, you generally won’t use more than one of these for a given project.

The few other things you mentioned (Rust, Bash) don’t really have much to do with web development in particular, so at the least, they’re not anything you immediately (or possibly ever) need to worry about.

Is it all that bad to make a pure HTML5 website with JS, HTML, CSS, and no extensive frameworks? from web_design

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