Want to get started building mobile apps with Ionic and Firebase but not sure what you need to know first?

Don’t worry, I’ll cover here what the skills you need to get up and running with full-stack development if you follow this path, you’ll be building your apps within a few months (maybe less if you can put it more time).

Get Started with Ionic App Development

If you want to get started with Ionic app development, first you’ll need to understand what this is.

In plain English, You build your apps using web technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScrip and then use a tool like Capacitor you can deploy your app to Google Play, the App Store, or as a PWA.

I’m not going to convince you to become a web/mobile developer in this post, but if you do want to be one, I got the right tools for you to begin with 😃

Now that you have a better understanding of what it means, let’s cover what you need to know to start building Ionic Apps.

In order to develope apps with Ionic Framework you’ll want to know (Preferably in this order):

HTML and CSS

HTML and CSS are the languages you can use to build and style websites. Every single web page you see is using them.

If you are looking to learn them, you can use Code Academy and also CSS TRICKS.

JAVASCRIPT

JavaScript is the programming language of the Web. Programming makes computers do what you want them to do.

I came from a different background, my JavaScript skills where close to none, what really made a difference for me was Wes Bos' course ES6 for Everyone, it’s all in video and teaches you a lot about the new version of JS that’s ES6/ES2015, it paid itself the same day I bought it.

He also has another course for people that are 100% new to JavaScript called Beginner JavaScript.

I enjoy Wes' courses because they’re high quality and to the point.

ANGULAR

Ionic is a UI framework, they handle your views, animations, etc.

For the logic part, where you tell your app how to process data, which pages to go to, etc. You need a little more power, they work well with several JavaScript frameworks or with their own tool for web components called Stencil.

I use Angular as programming framework because it includes everything I need, it’s easy to use, and it includes a set of defaults that make sense (and that I don’t need to figure out myself.).

To get started with Angular, I used the Ultimate Angular bundle, it’s one of the best resources out there, and it was created by an Angular GDE.

IONIC FRAMEWORK

Ionic itself has to be my favorite framework of all times, it was like love at first sight, I started with it, and it felt intuitive.

If you want to get started with Ionic you can follow their docs or you can read tutorials here on my blog.

If you need a more step-by-step in depth guide, then you should consider Ionic Start from Joshua Morony.

Ionic Start is a complete text-based guide to Ionic and Angular from beginner level through to building professional grade applications. Concepts are taught from scratch, but the content will be valuable to intermediate - and even advanced - Angular developers.

Firebase

Firebase is like your backend, if your backend lifted weights and was completely managed by someone else 😃.

The best way to get started with Firebase for Ionic Framework is this site, I’ve created tons of guides and mini-courses to help you with that.