Data Transformation Made Easy

When it comes to learning web development, whether it’s frontend or backend, you’re going to come up against data—and as you break into the field, you’ll find that data manipulation simply can’t be avoided.

If you’re taking your first steps with front-end development, learning how to build and style your first website in HTML and CSS, you’ll likely add some functionality to it with JavaScript. As you’ll find in our free coding short course, this functionality might be anything from validating forms or alerting users, to storing temporary data or performing calculations.

This data could be as simple as user emails input through a form you’ve built on your website, or, better yet, a questionnaire. So, the time will come when you have gathered a large amount of data and want to manipulate it to get some different data out of it. Easy, right? 

One of the major stumbling blocks that you will come across when working with data manipulation as a web developer is the data itself. There are many different approaches to take with data manipulation, each with their pros and cons. As our own senior developer advises about learning JavaScript, getting your mindset right can be the first hurdle. 

Learning to think about data manipulation like a pro developer gives you the best possible start. This means that whichever approach you take with your coding, you can work to strike the right balance with your code. This balance is between creating a code that is readable and enjoyable for your fellow developers when they are looking over your code, and code that also performs and tests well when you run it.

This balance between expressiveness and performance is a common one in the world of web development. Often you just have to accept that each approach has its own pros and cons, and the overall pursuit of “clean” code is worth it. This pursuit is what any good web development program seeks to teach their students.

If you want to take your exploration of data even further, try learning some data analysis.  Going beyond data manipulation, data analysis has become an in-demand part of the web developer skillset. We don’t mean that a career in web development requires you to be an expert data analyst—just that having some basic skills in data analytics will make you a more competitive candidate in the web development job market.

For those wanting to read a bit more about the world of web development right now, check out these articles:

• What Are the Best Online Coding Bootcamps in 2021?
• What is Bootstrap: An Awesome Beginner’s Guide
• The 8 Biggest Web Development Trends at the Moment