It is a good idea to learn web development because you can turn this into a pretty good career. You can choose to work for an IT company or even strike out on your own as a freelance web developer. However, this is a very large field and you need to be very specific about what you learn or else you might easily get sidetracked with skills that are not particularly useful.
The most important language to learn is HTML5 because this is where the future of web development lies and you'll need it just to be able to start doing this work. CSS and PHP are also important and you will benefit from learning these once you are comfortable with HTML5. Once you have learnt the basics then you can also pick up Rails, Ruby, SQL, JavaScript and even Apache. There are many tools that you can pick up as you go along and they will enable you to be very effective as a web developer.
You'll need to put in a fair amount of time and effort in order to learn HTML5 so that you can get started at web development. You need to learn the different specifications of this language to start with and then proceed to more features such as input controls, semantic tags and selector API. You'll also need to learn various guiding principles for good design. Of course, the time you take to pick up all your skills depends on how hard you work and what resources you have.
There are many different ways in which you can learn web development. They include
- Tutorials and manuals (including books, video and audio guides)
- Training classes
- Video and audio guides
- Podcasts and screencast
- Online user groups
Make sure that you use the best possible resources in order to learn web development quickly and with the least amount of trouble. It is not sufficient to pick up just book knowledge even though you'll need to get a lot of this. You also need to put your learning into practice so that you can get really good at web development. You will be able to learn very quickly if you have a partner because you can then do a lot of practice in order to hone your skills. Once you have the necessary skills and experience then you will be able to earn a very good income this way.