Learn Web Design and Development

Meetup is a social networking website that facilitates group meetings in real life. We recommend finding a web developer group in your area with Meetup. You can learn a lot from other web developers. They can teach, inspire, and motivate you. Also, building websites is more enjoyable when you share your ideas with like-minded people.

Git is not just good for backing up your code. It is also an effective tool for collaborating with other coders. GitHub uses Git to host code of open source projects. You can practice your skills and give back to the web development community by contributing to these projects. This tutorial from Nettuts+ gives you practical tips for getting started.

These are the official guides for Ruby on Rails. They teach you how to implement common tasks required by web applications. Go through the guides to discover the potential of Rails to upgrade your website.

If you want to go deeper with jQuery, check out this video course about jQuery UI. This jQuery library contains user interface interactions, widgets, and effects to increase the usability and interactivity on your website. For example, once you learn how to use it, jQuery UI allows you to quickly add a slider, draggable element, or autocomplete feature to your site.

APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, allow you to use the data of other sites. Many popular sites like Twitter and Evernote have APIs and Codecademy has tutorials to show you how to use them. They have tutorials about searching for top YouTube videos with Javascript and sending text messages with Ruby using Twilio.