How I Would Learn to Code in 2025 (if I had to start over)

0:00coding is easy the hard part is knowing what to learn and most importantly what to skip in the next few minutes I am going to show you exactly what you need to know in order to build any online business my name is Mark I have built those 30 tiny internet businesses and I'm now financially independent if you start today you could be making money online with a digital product in just a few weeks so stay with me okay so the number one mistake people make when they're learning how to code is they want to go too fast and use those great AI tools to build a website yes you can

0:29input a little bit of English is going to create a beautiful site for you but this is misleading if you want to add more features if you want to fix bugs you will have no idea what to tell the AI because you need to know the fundamentals of the internet in order to be able to instruct an AI to code for you so we want to start first with the fundamentals and for that of course we're going to use AI but not to code but to explain us how the internet works the first part is understanding how the internet works as a consumer you right now browsing YouTube you are an internet

0:57consumer what I would do very first is to go to chat GPT and just explain me what is happening when I visit whatever website your favorite website.com ask CH GPT to not use any technical skills and to explain this simply using metaphors try to understand the the the overall journey of what happens when you visit a websites then you will want to learn the fundamental concepts internet browser HTTP URL DNS those are some of the Core Concepts of the internet the entire internet relies on those Concepts to try to learn what each of them is doing without getting too much into details but just the overall The Core Concepts

1:32and again here you want to use tgpt to explain you exactly what it is and then to have a pick at what's next open the developer console just like this and inspect any website and over the elements and try to you know just get curious of what you actually see as a developer the next part is to understand internet as a developer what do you have to do as a developer so that your website is seen by millions of people across the world first you will need to install a code editor you have vs code you have cursor AI the which are great editors and then you want to build web

2:01pages if you have completed the previous step you now know what a web page is and you want to learn those three languages HTML CSS and JavaScript one more time any website you see on the internet is made with those three languages you don't want to go too deep you want to learn just 10% of each of those languages just enough in order for you to build a tiny web page that you could send to a friend it could be just your portfolio website that could be just a landing page for your future business idea it doesn't matter you can build anything with h HML CSS and JavaScript

2:31for each of those three languages I added some of the core components you want to learn so for instance you want to learn what are HTML links inputs button Etc HTML is used as a structure of a page CSS is mostly like to style things so uh properties like colors display margin padding Etc are important to learn and JavaScript you used to make a web page interactive like uh pressing buttons like double clicking on here for instance don't overthink it just learn the minimum you need to build a little web page and show it to a friend by by the way if you need this road map I'll

3:01add a link in the description so that you can uh follow along with me and whenever you're done learning one of those elements you can just uh double tap and I think it will save your progress okay now we are entering the fun part you're watching this video probably because you want to build an online business you so you will need a landing page to present your idea you will need a probably like a private user dashboard so people can do stuff like update their profile or download files and probably a way to send emails and charge payments we're going to cover all that in this section and the first thing

3:31you want to do is to pick a text tack this is my text tack uh I use the this these tools and products and libraries in order to uh build my 30 websites for instance I use Daisy UI as a component library to style my websites I use OJs to authenticate users I use data fast to track web analytics now you may be wondering why we're not using pure HTML JavaScript and CSS and the answer is just because of the speed you want to ship apps fast to the market you could technically build anything with HTML and CSS but as developers we are we are lazy

4:03and so it's better to use a text tag like react to build UI components instead of writing them in pure HTML JavaScript and CSS as a quick example uh if you want to make just a button with a counter where when you press it increase the counter by one this is what you would have to do using HTML and JavaScript but if you're using react this library in order to build user interface you would just have to write this in other word having a text tack will help you ship faster there's a big misconception especially on YouTube where people will try to make you feel like you're missing out if you don't try

4:32the the newest UI library or the latest reactjs version or something this is pure procrastination what you want to do is you pick one text Tack and you stick to it forever uh if you want you can just copy mine this is a very popular text tack you don't have to use all the third party tools I'm using here uh a lot of them are have like a specific use case and we're going to cover that later okay once you have your Tex tack you need to get just a little comfortable with the terminal the terminal is this little app that is installed already on your computer that lets you navigate

5:00with your computer but as a developer there are four commments here that I think are important to know and again Ask chpt to explain you real quick what is the terminal and how to use it then you're going to have to set up your computer so that depends on the text you've picked of course for this video I'm going to pretend you've picked the exact same text tack as me first you'll need to install nodejs so it lets you run JavaScript everywhere then you want to also install nextjs which is like a framework that's going to uh compile and combine all of your pages that we're

5:26going to serve to the client and if you haven't already you will need a code editor and then you will have an entire project up and running at this point you want to understand a little bit of what is going on because this uh nextjs thing is going to install a bunch of stuff so let's uh you know step by step break down what is on your machine so first you will have access to a package manager called npm it's basically a bunch of uh libraries and free stuff that other developers have built that you can reuse for instance this is one of my websites and you can see here

5:57there's a beautiful chart that changed colors Etc I did not create this chart by myself I am using a library called rechart and this library is available on npm you want to understand a little bit of how npm works you are basically two things you have a package.json which is like the kind of the control center of your app which you will find right here in your project and you have two commands npm install to install a package npm run to run a script another big part is the linter called es L if I go back to my code and I make a typo I remove these brackets then I will see

6:27red colors it's because I have a l basically a little program that runs on my machine that tells me when I make mistakes as a developer so I make just less mistakes you also want to understand a little bit about how the next chest architecture works so as you can see here in this project I have a bunch of folders I have app components data uh you might have less than this because this is an actual project where I built stuff on it but you will probably have the app folder and a few other files uh you want to ask chpt to explain you a little bit of how this

6:54works a quick tip here what you can do is you can ask an AI inside of your code editor uh to explain you what this or that does okay the next one is the version control system so there are two major components to that there is a GitHub GitHub is basically Google Drive for developer so this is for instance my profile on GitHub those are all the repository so all the projects I work on you want to create an account and this is where you're going to start pushing code and to push code to upload your code you'll need to use gits so you need to install gits then you want to learn

7:25the very basic of gits G add git commit git push that's all all you need to know in order to use Git it can get really complex so just learn those ones and git is going to help you make versions of your codes whenever you make an update on your ad you can write a little message and then you push this update and it will be pushed automatically to GitHub okay now you have a little understanding of your project you want to move on and you want to start building a landing page you want to start with the visual part things that you can send to friends that people can

7:50see because it's the I mean at least for me it is the funniest part so there are three major components when you're building a landing page with this modern text tack one is react react is a library that is going to help us build interative user interactions like user interface um those are of the core concept of react that I think you should be learning and these are some a little Advanced JavaScript concept that you haven't learned previously that you will have to learn as well to uh use react properly nextjs is a wrapper like a it's a framework around react it's going to organize all your pages and files Etc

8:26one more time here you want to learn just the minimum you need to build something um this is for instance what our react hooks are you will learn that later um there are around 20 of them I built 30 websites using the three hooks only so you really really really don't need to learn everything okay and the final component The Styling part is done with Tailwind CSS uh this is what you would find in Project like this where you would write semantic classes in order to style your app and on top of it I use the daisy UI component Library so this little website here where uh they

9:00give you a bunch of components like those uh toggle checkbox uh cards Etc I want my uh website designed to always look similar I don't want to design everything from scratch and so Daisy UI gives me access to a bunch of components once you build a little something to present you want to deploy your site on the internet I use versal to host all of my websites for instance those are all of my projects on versal and this is what it looks like as a workflow so you as a developer work on your computer you git commit and git push your changes which will be uploaded to GitHub and

9:33then when uh there is a new update on GitHub they're going to update versal your server on the internet and versal is going to run some comments and to deploy redeploy your new website uh you will see it is actually extremely simple and by the way I am not paid by versal or any of the other uh tools I promote in this video this is not a sponsored video those are just the tools I use for myself and finally you will want to get a domain name that's the funniest part as a developer you I use name sh to my domain names if for some reason the Doom

10:02is not available for your idea which is likely to happen because they're all taken um it doesn't matter yeah you don't need to have aom TLD aom extension in order to make money on the internet just try to buy a domain name that is easy to read and makes sense and congratulation you can already build a front page you can add a pay button and you can already make money on the internet now you might want to do some more advanced stuff like saving users in database downloading things Etc this is where the backend notion comes in place a back end is basically all the things

10:30that are not visible to visitors of your site one of the most common use of backend is API endpoint an API endpoint is basically like a little door where you can send information you can save that someone click on your site you can uh create a checkout link you can save a user in the database it all starts with an API endpoint some developers are using different framework and even different languages to create API endpoints but since we're using next JS for our project you can just create an entire API endpoint using the SLA SL API folder if you can just create a file named route. JS in this folder you will

11:04have created an API endpoint and congrats you are a backend developer so you will learn some of the fundamentals concept we talked about earlier what is an HTTP method what is what are htttp parameters and how to return a respond from this API endpoint there are also some Advanced JavaScript uh things you will have to learn because then it brings the notion of asynchronous when you call an API the request has to go through the internet you don't know how long that takes so uh that's why we have to um handle those cases with JavaScript async weight and promises and if you want to haveen you can also call another

11:35API not your own API but someone else for instance chpt has an API uh you can uh get started in just a few minutes and you can for instance just use this little piece of code in order to call the chbt API now having an API endpoint is nice but you likely want to do something with this API endpoint and one of the most common uh use of a back end is to have a database they store some information for my database I use a nosql database it's mongodb it's hosted on mongodb Atlas so this little website here they have a free plan so you can

12:06create a little cluster like a little mini database for free and because I'm lazy and I want to visualize my database on my computer without having to code I use compass mongodb compass in order to um see what's inside of my database and to connect to your database mongodb is going to give you a little connection string which is like a private key that only you should know in order to um connect to database and perform operations like read or write the database that's when the notion of environment variables comes in so in your project there is something called of. loo which is like a secret file that

12:40you want to keep on your machine only I cannot show you mine at the moment uh but is basically where you want to store all your connection string API Keys Etc going back to the examples of chpt earlier um if you want to call the chpt API they will also give you an anop aai API key like a secret key in order to uh identify yourself and say like hey I am developer XYZ and I want to ask jgpt this question right now that we have a database moving on to authenticated users for that I use OJs this open source project here is very simple to

13:09get started um with just a few lines of code you can have a page like this one when you have a button for people to log in with Google login with email Etc uh they have core concept the provider is basically what uh type of services users will be able to use to log in so Google and magic links for instance adapters is where you're going to store the user data so when the user log in with Google for instance I want to save the user data in my database and OJs is going to do that automatically for me you also want to learn about cookies because

13:35those are like very important like you need cookies in order to authenticate users and then you will see it's pretty simple you want to sign in sign out users so there's like just two functions and then you will create private Pages private apis like content that is only available for people who are logged in to your app you might have to send emails there are two types of email there's the transactional emails and the marketing emails marketing emails are the ones who usually end in your folder transactional emails are are emails that we send as developer for people to sign in for instance you can send like a

14:04login to my app and there's a magic link and you would send that by email I use a resend for that they're really good because they also have marketing emails so if I if I want to follow up and you know uh send marketing emails like discounts I can use uh resent as well you will learn about MX record which are like a DNS record specifically for sending emails and um and of course you'll learn about sending magic links and now moving on to the next part charging money on the internet for for that you will need a payment provider uh there are two famous ones stripe and

14:33lemon squeezie and many others I use stripe personally uh if you're from India you won't be able to use stripe so you can use lemon squeezy uh they make everything a little simpler cuz they handle the vat for you I have been using stripe for a long long time and I basically open a new stripe account for any kind of business I launched on the internet depending on what type of payment you want to handle uh you will likely have to learn how to create a checkout session so that implies creating like a physical component a little H button like this one for people to click and it will uh open a payment

15:04page just like this one and the webbook stripe is going to send you a little notification to your API endpoint that says that hey this person with this email just made a payment this is where you would uh give the person access to your service and then very likely you will need a customer portal or customer billing whatever this is called uh this is the place where usually you can go uh here and click billing I can see what is my current plan what the credit card is used what is the invoice I'm using in stripe it's called portal it's very simple to set up they'll give you back a

15:32little URL like this one and you can give to your customers and they can handle everything here themselves right now you already have all the core concept of building a digital business uh one thing that is very important is about security to make sure that you don't leak your customer data that uh everything is safe etc for that you can use AI heavily inside of your codebase you normally have a chat with an AI and then you can ask lots of question do you think my app is safe you can start like large and refine until you uh cover every edge cases you really want to make

16:02sure that you ship an app where there is no security flows there are things that are important in terms of security it's to understand the notion of react server and client components it's safe to do things inside of react server components because they stay on the server it's not safe to do things like SEC things on the client components of course you want to use environment variables and store your API keys there to make sure that you don't push them accidentally on the internet uh you want to make sure that your API end points are safe and secure for instance that you verify that the person is authenticated in order to make

16:32the request that the person eventually has paid for a service in order to make the request Etc and then for more advanced concept where you uh your app is deployed on the internet you might have like people trying to scam you or something um you could use middlewares or firewalls in order to block access to your app to some countries some people Etc and uh finally you might want to learn some advanced concepts I don't really recommend learning anything unless you have like a strong use for it but those are some things that might be worth your time uh in nextjs learn how to use metadata in order to um

17:05eventually be index and rank on Google you can learn how to use tawin CSS Transitions and animations in order to make your app a little bit nicer to use the local storage in JavaScript is a really nice place to uh store some data where you don't need a database that is really up to you and up to your needs and we are now entering the most exciting part the 10x programmer using AI likely in your code editor you already have an AI that will help you write code explain Etc if you're using VSCO they have a free plan if you're using Cur like me I think it starts at

17:35$20 a month the llm is basically like the type of large language model you're using I'm using clo 3.7 sunet at the moment they just released it but to be honest it really doesn't matter as long as you don't do some like very Advanced programming uh it wouldn't make much difference and your AI will become your best buddy there are three core features the autocomplete one is more like a inline feature where you can select a line uh press command K and you can just you know rewrite a little something you have chat features that I use usually to ask the AI about how to organize my data

18:07about security Etc and a composer which can use an agent and can create files for you run script Etc you can become super super duper fast using AI you just have to use it right I'll link below to a video that I made about exactly how I use AI to code 10x faster there has never been a better time in history to learn how to code and build a side project for sure coding takes time but if you show up every single day for 30 minutes you won't believe where you are in just a few months from now future you is begging you to get started right now

18:37so close this video and go build something and just in case you want to dive a little deeper into this road map I made a longer three hours long video for free on YouTube where I walk you step by step through each of those steps until the next video I hope you keep shipping