Backend development

Stage 1 of 7 · 10 lessons · ~6 months

Your language and how HTTP works

Get fluent in one backend language and its runtime, and learn exactly what happens between a client and your server. Everything later in this roadmap sits on these two things.

Start: The terminal and Git

Lessons· one lesson for each topic, in this order

  1. 1The terminal and Git
  2. 2The dotnet CLI and NuGet
  3. 3C# syntax, classes and records
  4. 4Collections, generics and LINQ
  5. 5Exceptions and nullable types
  6. 6async/await and Tasks
  7. 7DNS: from a name to an address
  8. 8TCP connections and TLS
  9. 9HTTP requests, responses and headers
  10. 10HTTP methods and status codes

Start with

  • GuideFree
    Learn C#

    Microsoft · Beginner

    Official C# tutorials from the language basics through classes, LINQ and async

Practise

  • Exercism

    Your language track: small exercises with free mentor feedback on idiomatic code

Keep handy

  • W3Schools

    Quick syntax lookups for your language when you forget how something is written

  • MDN Web Docs

    Read the HTTP overview, methods, headers and status code pages until they feel obvious

Also worth your time

Before moving on: Write a small C# console tool with the dotnet CLI and xUnit tests, push it to GitHub in sensible commits, and explain every line of output from curl -v against a real website.

Tauseef's advice
Learn modern .NET on the cross-platform dotnet CLI, not old .NET Framework tutorials. Take async/await and nullable reference types seriously now; ASP.NET Core leans on both everywhere. For the full .NET developer path, including Blazor and Angular or React front ends, follow the .NET roadmap at sefism.com/roadmaps/dotnet/.

Mark this stage as not done?