Skills for Front-End Developers | Impressive Webs

By Louis Lazaris on December 20th, 2011 | 77 Comments

As a front-end developer, I’m constantly trying to learn new skills and technologies and adding to what I already know. Front-end developer job postings, however, vary from posting to posting so the list of different languages, libraries, and technologies that could theoretically fall under the category of front-end developer skills is quite large.

Here’s a list (that I’ll continue to update) containing a wide variety of skills and technologies that I think all front-end developers should be working on learning, at least to some extent. I certainly don’t know all of these, nor do I expect anyone else to.

The list is not necessarily in any particular order, but I tried to keep the more rudimentary stuff at or near the top. Also, many of the items overlap others, so there’s a lot of cross-over within the list. And of course the list has lots of potential for improvements (more on that below).

• XHTML / HTML5
• CSS2.1 / CSS3
• JavaScript / Ajax
• jQuery
• HTML5 Boilerplate
• Modernizr
• YUI Library
• OOCSS
• CSS Grids
• CSS Frameworks / Resets
• Progressive Enhancement / Graceful Degradation
• HTML and CSS Specifications (W3C / WHATWG)
• UX / Usability
• Website Speed / Performance
• Dojo / MooTools / Prototype
• Responsive Web Design
• Mobile Web Development
• Mobile Web Performance
• Cross-Browser / Cross-Platform Development
• Document Object Model (DOM)
• IE6-IE8 Bugs and Inconsistencies
• CSS Pre-Processors (LESS / Sass)
• Debugging Tools (Firebug, etc)
• Version Control (Git / GitHub / CVS / Subversion)
• HTML5 APIs
• OOP
• PHP
• Ruby on Rails
• MySql
• Accessibility
• WAI-ARIA
• Microdata / Microformats
• Internationalization
• HTML5/CSS3 Polyfills
• Functional Programming
• JSON
• Localization
• Content Strategy
• Offline Web Apps
• SVG
• Canvas API
• Image Editing Tools (Photoshop, Fireworks, etc.)
• Web Font Embedding

I may eventually turn this post into an extended list divided into categories plus links to articles and tutorials where these subjects can be learned or mastered — but for now you’ll just have to trust your Google searching abilities if you want to learn more on any of these.

Please Contribute

The list is a rough first draft, and I’d be happy to update it and refine it based on any feedback. So please offer your suggestions on how it could be improved and/or expanded and I’ll make any necessary updates.

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Topic for conversation. What do you think?