Backend Web Development

 Put shortly, the main difference between frontend and backend web development is that in frontend development, you are directly working with the content that you see, whereas a backend developer works on the things that happen behind the scenes. If you’ve only ever known about frontend development, then it may seem difficult to see why backend development could be useful because it doesn’t you can’t visually see what you create. This could not be farther from the truth, however, as backend development is what really allows websites to become functional and practical applications. To motivate why backend development is useful, look at YouTube, for example. YouTube is such a large and powerful platform because of its backend and systematic approach to distributing videos. This is all possible because of its ability to connect millions of users together and perform algorithms that, for better or for worse, dictate the way that content is distributed to its users.

Some of the major topics in backend development is server-side or isomorphic rendering, databases, file servers, clouds services, backend logic/algorithms, managing servers, data processing, security/encryption, authentication, APIs, object-oriented programming, and much more. Backend web development is done through tools such as server-side languages and/or frameworks such as Node.js, Python, Django, Java, MySQL, MongoDB,  PHP, Ruby on Rails, and more. Many things are possible when you connect the backend with the frontend—this can be done through APIs (Application Programming Interface) which essentially create a way for you to interact with the frontend by making requests to retrieve, post, or modify data from the backend to the frontend.

If you like to understand how things work and like to know what happens behind the scenes, then backend development is a very exciting area of software development to dive into.

Thanks for reading!

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