Front-End Fact Sheet:

Here are some quick facts that can help you evaluate whether Front-End Programming is the right path for you!

What are the different types of Front-End developers?

• There really isn’t a clear distinction between different types of Front-End developers. Some might happen to do more of one kind of task than others, but all Front-End developers need the same general body of skills and knowledge.
• Design focused developers create sites that look and feel intuitive to the user. They spend most of their time writing HTML and CSS.
• Application focused developers use frameworks to create logic that powers interesting interactive user experiences on websites. These developers most often use JavaScript.

What are the essential Front-End programming skills?

• Empathy - The ability to see the thing you’re creating from your users’ perspectives. Remember, you aren’t developing a website for yourself, you’re creating it for other people.
• Breaking down problems - Breaking problems into manageable chunks is an essential problem-solving skill. You need to think about communication, design and architecting an application. In order to do all of these tasks, you need to be able to step back and plan out how you’ll turn a seemingly monolithic task into logical and reasonable chunks.

What are important concepts Front-End programmers need to know:

• Front-End developers focus on parts of the web that users see and interact with.
• Front-End developers access and present data from multiple sources on the internet through Application Program Interfaces (APIs).
• A Front-End developer is someone who builds the interface on an application that runs on a variety of devices. These interfaces should responsively transition from mobile to tablet to desktop.
• Every web page and web app is created with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. All of the images, buttons, transitions, animations, drop-down menus, contact forms, and styling elements are all controllable using these technologies.

What are some Front-End Frameworks Front-End developers use?

• Applications are built on top of frameworks like Angular.js, Ember.js, Backbone.js, Knockout.js, React.js and Polymer.js. There are similarities and differences, however if you can pick up one, you can pick up all of them.
• Front-End developers use frameworks like Angular.js and Ember.js to organize data using industry-standard design patterns which help synchronize user actions and data with a web server.

How will I know if I'm ready for a path in Front-End programming?

If you've completed the previous lessons in this Nanodegree Program, you already have an understanding of HTML syntax, and the structure of HTML, CSS and Python. This will enable you to pick up Javascript libraries like JQuery and to use CSS frameworks like Bootstrap. While Javascript and Python are different, they share similarities as well: functions, variables, data-types, loops, and conditional statements are used by both languages.