Everyone knows that the first steps to being a frontend developer is learning HTML, then CSS and then you move on to JavaScript. In case you don't, now you do. You can't really skip these steps and jump on to a framework or anything - if you want to be a frontend developer. These skills are required in whatever libraries or frameworks you'll priorities later on.

After learning those, the next steps should be choosing a framework. This process can be a very tough one since there are so many options out there, there are things you might want to consider when choosing a framework to learn. Let's pause a little and talk about why you need to learn a framework.

Why exactly do you need to learn a framework? You just learnt HTML, CSS and JS and it basically does everything you want it to do. Here is an answer: Unless you want to settle for CMSs (Content Management Systems), if you really want to be a frontend developer that actually wants to be in this field, you'd have to learn one frame work or the other to pilot your career in that path.

According to CueLogic,

The purpose of framework is to allow designers and developers to focus on building an unique feature for their web based projects rather than re-inventing by coding.

Web frameworks help us achieve structure in our applications, and they give us additional features we can add to them without too much extra work

You don't want to start writing some codes that have been simplified y these frameworks from scratch or handle them yourself. Frameworks are meant to boost your performance and maintenance and are equipped with some features that make development a tad bit easier. A few of these may include: database access, and session management. It can even go as far as handling authentication management in some cases.

Now, that you understand a little about the role of a framework, which ones would you want to consider? If you want to be a pure frontend developer, no shades of backend mix, then you might want to consider some JS frameworks. React, Angular, Vue, Ember, JQuery are all popular frameworks - React decided it is a library though - to consider. Although there are a host of others out there just a google "popular frontend frameworks" and you'll have dozens of them brought up to you. Back to where we came from, how do you choose which frontend framework to use?

I always advice new developers to stick to one side, if they are going frontend, they should go full frontend. That's my own opinion though. And I always tell them to go for Js frameworks. So all I will be talking about from here on will be JS frameworks and which one to choose based on what reason.

You can choose a frontend framework to learn based one or more of these:

• Popularity
• Availability of learning resources.
• Usability
• Ease of Integration
• Core features

The follow up post to this one will explain each of these concepts. This is so to avoid too much content crammed into one blog post. See you on the next one.