Full-stack developer tools complete list to become a full-stack web developer in 2026. The demand for programmers continues to rise even after the pandemic. If you’re wondering if it’s too late to start, it’s not too late. Let’s learn the core Essentials to become a full-stack developer. The complete list of tools to become a web developer in 2026.
Following that full-stack developer, I’ll discuss a few optional extracurricular technologies you might find interesting.
First of all, be clear that you don’t need to learn every technology out there, and the best way to pick a technology is to look at the market. The companies that you want to work for and see what technologies they use, then learn those Technologies and languages.
The great thing is that once you’ve learned one programming language. It’s pretty easy to learn another one.
Now, let’s get into it. Before you even get started learning web development, you need to know that the best skill any developer can Master is Googling. Google is a developer’s best friend when you don’t know how to fix an issue or you need to learn how to accomplish a specific task.
The first thing that you should do is Google it, try to find the answer to your questions on your own, and do research, especially when learning new technology.
The documentation for that technology will most likely answer all of your questions now. If you do need to reach out to the community for help, be very detailed in what your issue is, what you’ve already tried and what you’ve already searched for. Get really good at Googling; even the most experienced developer can’t remember everything.
Full Stack Developer Tools Complete List to become a web developer.
- Internet and WWW
- Googling
- Browsers
- Code Editor
- Frontend (HTML, CSS, JAVASCRIPT)
- SEO and Site Speed Tester
- Version Control (Git, Gitlab, Github)
- npm (node.js)
- APIS
- Database (MYSQL, SQL, Postgres SQL and, Microsoft SQL,and MongoDB.
- JS Frameworks such as React, Vue. js, next.js etc.
- CMS (WordPress)
- CSS Frameworks (Bootstrap, Tailwind CSS)
- Authentic Techniques
- AI
1. Internet and WWW
The important thing that you should understand is: how the internet works; you need a basic understanding of how browsers, domain names, hosting Services, HTTP, HTTPS and how DNS works.
Now have a couple of great resources that will help you understand these Concepts. After that, next you need to set up your basic tools. Your web development environment.
2. Browsers
- Chrome,
- Microsoft Edge,
- Brave,
- Mozilla, Firefox
- Internet Explorer,
- Opera
Now, the main tools are going to be your browser, code editor and terminal.
So let’s go over those browsers that are very important tools for a web developer.
Only through a browser do the end users view your applications.
I prefer to use Chromium-based browsers as my main browser, and I actually use Microsoft Edge specifically, but Chrome and Brave are other Chromium-based browsers that are great. However, when it comes to testing your websites or web apps,s you need to test these in all of the major browsers to ensure that your application will work properly.
Currently, Many developers test every project in Chrome. But also Edge, Safari, and Firefox to make sure that it looks great and works on all of them. Testing your web apps with these browsers will give good results.
3. Integrated Development Environment (IDE) or Code Editor
- VS Code
- Sublime Text
- Notepad++
- Brackets
- Atom
- eclipse
- IntelliJ IDEA
- WebStrom
Now, let’s talk about the text editor. It is a web developer’s best friend; the better you understand what it is capable of, the more efficient, accurate and quick you’ll be in writing your code.
Favourite code editor is VS Code or Visual Studio Code, and it’s the most popular code editor for the vast majority of developers, so far.
There are tons of resources on YouTube channels that can help you install, configure and become familiar with VS Code if you really want to become a pro in VS Code.
Now, another option, and the one that developers use, is git bash if you’re on Mac OS or Linux.
4 . Basic Web Development Tools
- HTML
- CSS
- JS
It’s time to start coding. The first things that you need to learn are HTML, CSS and JavaScript. HTML provides the structure of a website, CSS makes it look good, and JavaScript makes things happen. So the first thing to learn is HTML. Every web page uses HTML.
It’s the main building block of the web. HTML provides the structure of a website, and it’s actually not a programming language but a markup language. You’ll need to learn the basic syntaxof Symantec HTML forms and validation accessibility, also SEO and best practices.
CSS is another important part of every website; it makes them look good by styling the HTML elements, and it adds Flair with Transitions and animations. There is a lot to do with CSS if you prefer to focus on front-end development.
You must understand CSS fully after learning the basics. You want to learn the layout features of Flexbox and the CSS grid. After that, be sure to get comfortable with responsive design, including REM units, viewport widths, fluid widths, and media queries, and then there are CSS Frameworks.
Some people just skip over the CSS Basics and go straight to a CSS framework, and that’s not good. You really need to have a solid understanding of CSS before learning a CSS framework.
Thus, I wouldn’t suggest looking at any CSS Frameworks at this time, but they are included later on in the post, and then there’s JavaScript.
JavaScript is the first programming language that you’ll learn as a web developer.
HTML is a markup language, CSS is a styling language, and JavaScript is actually a programming language or scripting language. It makes the web do things, and so you’ll need to learn the basic syntax, DOM manipulation,n the fetch API, JSON and ES6 plus features, so you should spend most of your time on this part.
5. Frontend Tools /Frameworks, and libraries
- HTML,
- CSS,
- JS,
- React,
- Angular,
- Express,
- Vue Js
- TypeScript
Let’s understand JavaScript before moving on to other technologies, and this is for those who want to learn a JavaScript framework like React, Vue.js or Svelte.
Don’t start learning a framework without understanding vanilla JS. It is just plain old JavaScript.
These Frameworks are based on JavaScript, and so you need this knowledge.
Next, I’d recommend that you learn a bit more about the terminal, so as you start getting into Version Control Frameworks deployments and other Tech you’ll need to use the terminal more and more,e and so this is a good time to get more comfortable with the terminal.
5. Version control tools:
- Git,
- Gitlab,
- GitHub
Version Control is very important to learn. Version Control allows you to keep track of changes to your code base. This becomes very important as you start to work with other developers on a team.
Each person is making changes to the code base, and these need to be tracked, so you should learn git and GitHub. These allow you to keep track of changes and elaborate on projects and are an integral part of the CI/CD pipeline. CI/CD stands for continuous integration and continuous deployment.
Next, you need to understand how to set up a hosting service and deploy a basic website. The easiest way to do this is through a static host like netlif5 cell Cloud flare or even GitHub pages, and these allow for easy deployment that can be integrated with GitHub.
This way, every time you update your GitHub repo, your site will automatically rebuild and redeploy. Now, if your application requires a true back-end environment. You’ll want a more traditional hosting service like Heroku, Linode, or there are many others. Now you should know enough to call yourself a front-end engineer.
After all this learning, you should be able to build a basic website, deploy it and manage it.
6. Backend Technology:
- Node.js
- Express
- TypeScript
- Python,
- Django
- PHP
- Java
- Go
Now, let’s start looking at some back-end technologies since you’ve already learned JavaScript. You might want to start looking into Node.js. Node.js allows us to use JavaScript on the backend server. With Node.js combined with Express.js, we can define routes, build out APIS connect to databases, and so much more.
You’ll also learn about package management. Node.js comes with npm, which is node package manager. Package managers allow us to easily add pre-built packages into our applications, which let you accomplish various tasks without recreating the wheel every single time.
APIS and JSON
- GrapQL
Next, it’s time to learn about APIs (application programming interfaces. These allow you to perform some sort of query or computation on the back end and then send the results of that to the front end. A simple example is requesting data from a database; the API on the server will perform that action and then send the data to the front end.
This allows us to add a layer of security to our applications. We don’t want the front end to perform these actions since that would expose our database login credentials. The API allows us to do all of this behind the scenes and just send the resulting data to the user. Now, you’ll hear the term rest or restful API; there are other types as well, like GraphQL.
9 . Databases :
- SQL,
- MySQL
- Microsoft SQL Server
- PostgreSQL
- Oracle
- MongoDB = NOSQL database
Just about every site has some data that it needs to keep track of, examples are products for sale on an e-commerce website or blog posts. There are many different types of databases there are relationa,l document graphs, columns and many others.
I don’t think that there is one technology to rule them all. There are different types of databases for a reason, now some are better than others depending on the use case, so I’m not going to tell you that one database is the best and you should always only use this one type of Technology.
Do your own research to understand Technologies so that you can pick the best ones for your specific use case.
Now relational databases are a lot like spreadsheets with tables, rows and columns. These tables link to each other using a unique identifier. Relational databases are more strict, and they require you to define each table’s column and type ahead of time, so in this way, you have a predefined schema because of the way these databases are structured.
You’ll most likely want an ORM or object-relational mapper to make mapping disconnected data easier this way when queried the database will return all of that connected data that you need because for each query it has to reach out to each table, join the data back together and then return the results to you the most popular relational databases use SQL or structured query language, examples of these are MySQL, Postgres SQL and Microsoft SQL.
When relational databases have been around for decades, and not much has changed in the document databases, however, they are relatively newer technology but they bring many benefits over SQL databases. Document databases are not as strict as relational databases by default,t but they can be as strict as you need.
JSON
So there’s more flexibility, the document database also uses documents, which are basically structured as JSON.
Since JSON is based on JavaScript, it’s much easier to understand and implement into your application, and because of this, there is no need for forms. The best example of a document database, in my opinion, is MongoDB.
8. Frontend Frameworks!
- React
- Felt
Frameworks have many advantages. You can build powerful single-page applications, and keep your components organised and easily build interactive UI when you’re working with a team. It becomes apparent how easy it is to break up an application into components for each team member to work on.
Now there are many Frameworks availabl,e but in my opinion, you should learn one of these, and these are in order of my preference, so React is the first one. React is by far my personal favorite and it’s fairly easy to learn,n and it has great Community Support.
It’s used in many companies,s and there are a lot of job openings for React Developers. The view is one of the easier. Frameworks to learn are awesome to work with, and also have great community support. It isn’t as popular in the job market, but. Every year, it’s adopted more and more.
These days angular is a very popular framework, but many people don’t enjoy working with it.
Now I think that it’s more suited to a very large application or corporation, but there are a lot of job openings for Angular developers, too.
FELT has gained a lot of popularity, and it’s very easy to learn because it just builds upon regular HTML, CSS and JavaScript; that’s why there’s no need to learn boilerplate code needed for other Frameworks if you learn React or Vue.js.
There are a lot of other Frameworks that are built on top of, these Frameworks and so examples of these are next.js and Gatsby, which are built on top of React and next.js. which is built on top of Vue.js.
Now you can look into one of these after learning React or Vue. If you want to add more built-in functionality out of the box, like static site generation and server-side rendering.
There’s even a full-featured full-stack framework built on top of Svelte called Svelte Kit.
It’s just like Next.js is to React.
9. CSS Frameworks
- Bootstrap,
- Tailwind
- CSS
- SASS
Next is a great time to learn CSS Frameworks, just like with JavaScript. Frameworks, it’s going to benefit you to know CSS before learning a CSS framework. Now, CSS Frameworks just make it easier to use CSS to style your application,s but you’re still using CSS now.
There are two popular CSS Frameworks Tailwind CSS and Bootstrap. These Frameworks make life easier for developers.
10. Authentic Techniques
Somehow, We Need to keep track of user interactions like a shopping cart, or it has user accounts. You’ll need to implement authentication.
Now you can go old school by using OAuth or JavaScript web tokens jwts Authentication and you can do all that manually,y but to make things easier.
You could use an authentication provider which will do all of that work for you, a great one. What you can use is Auth0. It allows you to easily manage the content of your site.
11. CMS (Content Management System)
If you are a freelancer, then you’ll most definitely want a good CMS for your customers to use so that they can easily update the content of their website themselves.
WordPress is probably the most popular CMS, but WordPress traditionally requires you to use their service for the backend CMS and for the front end, and so you’re basically locked in now. In the past few years,s headless CMSs have become very popular, especially with WordPress.
Now, has a headless option as well this allows you to use a headless CMS for the backend but then you can use any front-end technology that you want so now you’re not specifically tied to a technology on the back end and the front end a great example of other headless CMS is sanity I o and strappy now at this point of the roadmap you’ve learned enough front-end and back-end Technologies to call yourself a full-stack developer.
However, the learning never stops; you must keep up with updates and upgrades to the technologies you’ve learned so far and stay vigilant for new emerging technologies that could add value to current or future projects.
So, don’t stop learning something that often gets overlooked: soft skills, also known as people skills, along with personal development.
These are the top skills that you should invest effort in developing: communication, teamwork, attention to detail,l problem-solving, work ethics, time management, adaptability, interpersonal skills, creativity and Leadership.
Another huge issue that you will run into is losing motivation and imposter syndrome. You need to surround yourself with people who are supportive of you and understand that you are not alone. An amazing resource for motivation and dealing with imposter syndrome is Danny Thompson. You have to go check him out on YouTube and Twitter. From this point on in the video, everything.
It’s really cool. Astro is another really interesting framework. With Astro, you can build static websites using existing Frameworks altogether. You can incorporate React components, Vue components and use them all together with Astro. It can combine and build these out into static HTML sites, and it’s a very interesting approach.
No,w to build upon your JavaScript toolkit, you could learn typescript which is a superset of JavaScript. It allows for static typing. I don’t mean typing on the keyboard, typing of elements in your code. This helps you to catch errors and fix them before running your code when you’re using TypeScript.
It actually gets compiled into regular JavaScript on build, so this is a tool that can help you write better code, and it can be used with most frameworks. If you want to expand your CSS skills, you can look into CSS animations of preprocessors like SASS.
And different ways to incorporate CSS into your projects, like CSS modules and CSS in JS. now if you prefer working with the back-end. Technologies you might want to look into: learning another back-end language.
The best way to get a high-level understanding of what these languages are capable of is by checking out the 100-second videos from fireship. He has a bunch of great short explanations of each of these languages, like Go, Rust, Python, Dart, PHP, Java, Kotlin, C, C# and so on.
Machine Learning & AI
And, we saw over just the past few years rapid growth in machine learning platforms and applications such as GitHub Copilot and, more recently, ChatGPT. These are both based on OpenAI models.
Now AI is everywhere, so we should get used to it. It’s not going to go away, it’s also in fact,t there is a lot of demand for new developers who can develop and improve these AI Technologies.
Thus, this is definitely a field of study that you should check out. Remember, you don’t have to learn everything; you’ve learned the basics, focus on the technology used at your current job or your aspiring job.
so if your current employer uses angular focus on angular if the companies that you’re interviewing with use react focus on React before your interviews, then you can learn other languages in your spare time.
If you have any now if you’ve gotten comfortable with JavaScript and you want to learn some python in your spare time then do that and don’t be worried if you can’t keep up with current trends and Technologies most companies are not using the most up-to-date Technologies now remember learning something takes time it takes time and patience and practice to get good at something so be patient take your time never stop learning and never give up