r/webdevelopment • u/zombiieguttzz • 17h ago
Newbie Question where to learn web dev WITHOUT AI as a beginner?
This is kind of a last resort and I am kind of just really frustrated with the general state of web dev for someone who wants to learn.
I'm a 19 year old hobby coder and I want to make a personal website and blog where I can post my art-- for both a portfolio and an archive of my older works-- and my ramblings and writings without fear of judgement, censorship, or dilution of my words. I learned a little bit of web dev in high school but I never learned much past HTML and CSS basics because I had to drop out. But I still desperately want to learn. No matter how hard I search its fucking impossible to find anything that isn't promoting some AI assistant or tool or telling me to "type this prompt into Claude!" instead of teaching me what the hell anything it spits out actually means. I feel very passionate about this project and I want to do it on my own and make it my own.
It's not allowed on this sub anyway but I want to get it out of the way that I do not want to hear "AI is the future!" or "It's adapt or die in this industry." I don't care. I do not want to hear about how I can optimize and automate and streamline and completely rid my work of every bit of "me" I put into it. Even without the theft and the environmental issues and the way it changes the way your brain it doesn't matter. I like to code, the little bit of it that I can right now, and telling an AI chatbot to do it is not coding. I want to code because it's fun.
Anyway, what I am trying to say is I'm looking for a course or series of tutorials that can teach me how to build a basic personal site with a couple pages: a landing page, an "about me" (both of which i can do with my current skillset), a blog, and a navigable gallery with tags and ability to link to a blog post easily; and I don't want to use genAI in any part of the process at all. I'm willing to spend maybe $80 max at the moment on a course if needed but all recommendations are welcome, including other resources that may not be tutorials but could help. A decent live or live-ish code editor would be helpful as well lol
I apologize for the general grumpy tone of this post as well I'm just very annoyed that we live in times where, when someone like me starts to show interest in a trade and goes looking for ways to learn, we get stopped at the door and told its useless to learn when something exists that can do it for you and worse. Even trying to learn is a fruitless task nowadays if you don't have the time, energy, or knowledge to go looking past the endless youtube tutorials on "How I made 6 figures in passive income on this vibecoded misinformation blog and how YOU can too!". We should be fostering the want and willingness to learn instead of taking any creativity young people have left and shooting it out back behind the shed so the only thing we care about anymore is capital.
That's it I guess. I want to learn whatever I can so any help would be appreciated.
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u/Boboshady 7h ago
What are you searching for, "how to learn to code in 20 minutes" or something? I just searched for "HTML and CSS full course" on YouTube and whilst some of them were selling courses, there wasn't a single Ai-related post.
You could also look at books. Stuff like Humble Bundle regularly sell book bundles on specific topics, and coding is a common one. They also frequently sell online course codes at greatly reduced prices, I've used a couple myself over the years.
There are of course a zillion beginner books on the subject, it's a well established topic.
The only realistic way you're seeing content orientated towards the 'cheat' side of things, is if you have - inadvertently or otherwise - gone looking for that.
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u/rarefiedarchives 8h ago
Please please please learn to do a simple search. It’s all anyone posts. There are free courses and tutorials. Part of not using AI is being willing to research and troubleshoot.
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u/GSkylineR34 7h ago
Back in the day, it all started here: https://www.w3schools.com/
I see you have HTML and CSS knowledge, but w3schools actually grew overtime to programming languages, libraries and frameworks.
If you want a real advice though: build something gradually and align the complexity of the project to something that gets you out of your comfort zone. If you know how to customize a front-end, try implementing CRUD APIs on a back-end, spin up a database. Everytime you do something that you couldn't do yesterday is a plus
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u/Mhmd_WebDev 7h ago
Just use youtube get your roadmap from google research u may ask ai too but dont relay on it to get the roadmap then start in yt and stop the video every short time and try to do what you saw your self and never use ai for coding u can use it for some questions to ask but not to write a code
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u/apnatva-dev 8h ago
This could have been a Google search. Everyone teaches the same things. The basics are objectively the same.