The beginners bootstrap blunder

When you are learning to code specifically beginning your steps in HTML, CSS & JS. It’s tempting to take shortcuts. None more so than what I’m coining as ‘The Beginners Bootstrap Blunder’.

You’ve learnt the building blocks of HTML via a tutorial and want to start making those notepad like letters look pretty, heck you want to make a visual rocket. Many many guides will simply introduce you to bootstrap at this point and I believe they shouldn't. Don’t get me wrong , its an awesome tool to have under your belt and you can do some amazing stuff with it in small amounts of time.

BUT . . . .

It obfuscates detail , yes it solves problems but it makes those problems trivial and by throwing in bootstrap you won’t gain an appreciation or a full understanding for the work that goes into building what you are using.

A senior once told me: ‘Imagine you are putting up a picture frame and bootstrap is the drill to put the screws in the wall, you’ve never done this before but you are handed a drill anyway and you put the picture up. You move house and need to do the same thing again but your handy pal isn't on hand and you only have a screwdriver , you put the picture up again by hand and it takes ten times the effort, now you understand why you needed the drill’.

Boostrap is great but it cheats newbies out of vital CSS lessons that would help them form building blocks to build new stuff in CSS anywhere with or without bootstrap.

If you are reading this and all you have ever used it bootstrap do not despair, a great task to learn CSS in your area would be to take a bootstrap component you already use like a nav bar and rebuild it from scratch without using bootstrap. It’ll give you an awesome understanding for what is going on under the hood.

Basically learn CSS first . . . you can build anything with CSS knowledge and replicate it anywhere.