This is a resource page for leveling up dev skills useful for working with Shopify themes and apps.

For how-to guides on various topics within Shopify, see our Shopify Guides blog posts.

Udemy Courses by Category

Udemy is an excellent way to learn and advance your skills, especially developers.

Front end development

Build Responsive Websites with HTML and CSS – Popular course to learn HTML / CSS, the foundations of front end development.

The Complete JavaScript Course – Popular course to learn and master JavaScript.

20 Web Projects With Vanilla JavaScript – Sharpen your JavaScript skills so you don’t need to depend on libraries like jQuery.

Back end development

Dissecting Ruby on Rails 5 – Excellent course to learn Rails (great for building Shopify apps).

The Complete Node.js Developer Course – Use JavaScript on the server side.

Complete Python Bootcamp – Most popular course for learning Python.

Frameworks

React – The Complete Guide – React is great for developing the UI of embedded Shopify apps.

Angular – The Complete Guide – If you want to use JavaScript for your whole stack, Angular is a good choice in framework.

Shopify

Intro to Shopify Theme and Store Development with Liquid – Learn how themes work and how to customize.

Shopify courses – List of all Shopify courses on Udemy.

Notes about our technologies

All of our public Shopify apps use React and Polaris for the front end framework, and either Rails or Node for the back end.

The Shopify Analyzer is full JavaScript, built on the Angular framework.

Shopify App Development

These are the key skills for building Shopify apps:

  • Shopify API
  • Shopify Polaris
  • React
  • Server side language / framework
  • Hosting

If you don’t need to build an embedded UI for your app, you can skip React and Polaris.

Shopify App Development – Shopify’s app dev resource center.

Shopify API

User Interface

Polaris Components – modular components to provide a Shopify-like experience in your app.

React – JS library for building user interfaces. Works great with Polaris.

Hosting

Heroku – Easiest way to serve and deploy apps.

Digital Ocean – Another good place to host apps, some DevOps knowledge required.

Server side language

You can build mini apps / scripts using a language like Ruby, Python, or PHP.

For full apps, Rails and Node are the most supported frameworks (for plugins, documentation, examples).

Shopify is built on Rails and they maintain the very useful shopify_app gem, making Rails a good choice for Shopify app development.

Shopify Theme Development

Working with Shopify themes requires these skills:

  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JavaScript
  • Liquid

Liquid is the templating language Shopify themes are built on.

If you want to become a Shopify developer, focus on mastering HTML and CSS first, then JavaScript.

Reading the liquid docs front to back isn’t necessary, it’s easy to pickup so just learn the basics then use the docs as reference when you need it.

If you want to build your own themes, learn more in the Shopify Theme Development resources.

Final Notes

The best way to learn is by building. Take a course and build their demo project, then build something of your own to solidify your knowledge.

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