Javascript is the language of the web... there's no denying it. When it comes to front-end web development, Javascript is the language you need to learn. More and more, Javascript is also being used for backend as well. There's really no way around it. Through the years there have been other languages targeted at front-end web development, but none of them are even close to the popularity of plain Javascript, and none of them are as long-lasting.
Every year Stack Overflow conducts a survey for developers, asking them about their favorite technologies, what languages they use and many other things. In 2017, 64,000 developers of all sorts (not just web developers) took the survey and the insights and trends are fascinating. The whole survey is worth reading, but take a peek at this section. Javascript is, by a large margin, the most popular language according to the developers that took the survey.
The point here is, even if you don't want to be primarily a front-end developer, you are going to encounter some Javascript if you work in webdev, and chances are increasingly likely that you'll be working with it on a daily basis, even if it's not your primary language. With that in mind... let's dive in.
You do not need any previous programming or Javascript experience to follow this course because we are starting out at the very beginning. That said, we are expecting that you have at least a little bit of experience with HTML and CSS because a large part of what Javascript can do involves its interaction with those languages.
This course is set up as you might expect. We start off with the basics of the language. If you already have some programming experience, this section will likely go pretty quickly for you, because in many ways Javascript is much like any other programming language. We'd like to encourage you, however, not to skip or rush too quickly through this section. Javascript does have a few quirks that can trip you up if you aren't aware of them.
After our overview of the basics of syntax, we'll cover the basics of making your Javascript code interact with HTML and CSS so that you will be able to create impressive interactive websites with relative ease.
From there, we'll dive deep into the intricacies of the language, covering the topics that you'll need to understand to build fully functioning web-apps and, of course, do well in job interviews. Javascript can certainly be a complicated and confusing language at times, but we've done our best to break it all down into easy-to-digest chunks, that come in the right sequence, and of course we've sprinkled in plenty of projects along the way to keep your GitHub profile or Résumé full.
Increasingly Javascript is becoming an ecosystem with many tools, libraries and frameworks that are used to either enhance it's capability, or make certain things easier, but with few exceptions they all rely on knowing vanilla Javascript. In this course we will not be covering Javascript addons such as jQuery, React, Angular or anything like that. There are a couple of tools that we will cover along the way, but we'll explain them and why we're using them when the time comes.
This course is intended to cover the most recent versions of Javascript, and as such we will be talking about and using ES6. If you don't know what that means, don't fret, we'll cover it soon enough. For now, just be aware that Javascript is regularly evolving and receiving updates, and that we will be setting you up to use the latest versions of it.
- We'll introduce the topic briefly and provide you with a list of things you should pay attention to ("Points to Ponder").
- You'll be asked to do readings, watch videos, do online courses or otherwise consume content to initially learn the material.
- Every few lessons you will be asked to build a larger project.
- Finally, we'll include additional helpful resources and other potentially useful tidbits at the end of each lesson.