The World Wide Web (WWW) has changed tremendously since its beginning. In less than 30 years, it has morphed from a document-sharing space into a sophisticated platform that joins the world together. The role of developers, the ones behind the scenes of this global craze, has also changed accordingly.

Having started with the title Web Master — a job that required some knowledge of HTML and a little bit of Perl — the web developer role has changed into full-stack developer. A short title with a big meaning. As a full-stack developer, you're required to master many programming languages, markup languages, and tools — and that is before you even start working on the actual project at hand. It's an extremely challenging role, yet one of the most satisfying in the software industry.

In this chapter, we'll demystify what it means to be a full-stack developer and go through the basic concepts and ideas such a developer needs to know. We will cover the following topics:

• The full-stack developer
• Backend fundamentals
• Frontend fundamentals