Web Development for Beginners - A Curriculum

Azure Cloud Advocates at Microsoft are pleased to offer a 12-week, 24-lesson curriculum all about JavaScript, CSS, and HTML basics. Each lesson includes pre- and post-lesson quizzes, written instructions to complete the lesson, a solution, an assignment and more. Our project-based pedagogy allows you to learn while building, a proven way for new skills to 'stick'.

Hearty thanks to our authors Jen Looper, Chris Noring, Christopher Harrison, Jasmine Greenaway, Yohan Lasorsa, Floor Drees, and sketchnote artist Tomomi Imura!

Getting Started

Teachers, we have included some suggestions on how to use this curriculum. We'd love your feedback in our discussion forum!

Students, to use this curriculum on your own, fork the entire repo and complete the exercises on your own, starting with a pre-lecture quiz, then reading the lecture and completing the rest of the activities. Try to create the projects by comprehending the lessons rather than copying the solution code; however that code is available in the /solutions folders in each project-oriented lesson. Another idea would be to form a study group with friends and go through the content together. For further study, we recommend Microsoft Learn and by watching the videos mentioned below.

Gif by Mohit Jaisal

🎥 Click the image above for a video about the project and the folks who created it!

Pedagogy

We have chosen two pedagogical tenets while building this curriculum: ensuring that it is project-based and that it includes frequent quizzes. By the end of this series, students will have built a typing game, a virtual terrarium, a 'green' browser extension, a 'space invaders' type game, and a business-type banking app, and will have learned the basics of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS along with the modern toolchain of today's web developer.

🎓 You can take the first few lessons in this curriculum as a Learn Path on Microsoft Learn!

By ensuring that the content aligns with projects, the process is made more engaging for students and retention of concepts will be augmented. We also wrote several starter lessons in JavaScript basics to introduce concepts, paired with video from the "Beginners Series to: JavaScript" collection of video tutorials, some of whose authors contributed to this curriculum.

In addition, a low-stakes quiz before a class sets the intention of the student towards learning a topic, while a second quiz after class ensures further retention. This curriculum was designed to be flexible and fun and can be taken in whole or in part. The projects start small and become increasingly complex by the end of the 12 week cycle.

While we have purposefully avoided introducing JavaScript frameworks so as to concentrate on the basic skills needed as a web developer before adopting a framework, a good next step to completing this curriculum would be learning about Node.js via another collection of videos: "Beginner Series to: Node.js".

Find our Code of Conduct, Contributing, and Translation guidelines. We welcome your constructive feedback!

Each lesson includes:

• optional sketchnote
• optional supplemental video
• pre-lesson warmup quiz
• written lesson
• for project-based lessons, step-by-step guides on how to build the project
• knowledge checks
• a challenge
• supplemental reading
• assignment
• post-lesson quiz

A note about quizzes: All quizzes are contained in this app, for 48 total quizzes of three questions each. They are linked from within the lessons but the quiz app can be run locally; follow the instruction in the quiz-app folder. They are gradually being localized.

Lessons

	Project Name	Concepts Taught	Learning Objectives	Linked Lesson	Author
01	Getting Started	Introduction to Programming and Tools of the Trade	Learn the basic underpinnings behind most programming languages and about software that helps professional developers do their jobs	Intro to Programming Languages and Tools of the Trade	Jasmine
02	Getting Started	Basics of GitHub, includes working with a team	How to use GitHub in your project, how to collaborate with others on a code base	Intro to GitHub	Floor
03	Getting Started	Accessibility	Learn the basics of web accessibility	Accessibility Fundamentals	Christopher
04	JS Basics	JavaScript Data Types	The basics of JavaScript data types	Data Types	Jasmine
05	JS Basics	Functions and Methods	Learn about functions and methods to manage an application's logic flow	Functions and Methods	Jasmine and Christopher
06	JS Basics	Making Decisions with JS	Learn how to create conditions in your code using decision-making methods	Making Decisions	Jasmine
07	JS Basics	Arrays and Loops	Work with data using arrays and loops in JavaScript	Arrays and Loops	Jasmine
08	Terrarium	HTML in Practice	Build the HTML to create an online terrarium, focusing on building a layout	Introduction to HTML	Jen
09	Terrarium	CSS in Practice	Build the CSS to style the online terrarium, focusing on the basics of CSS including making the page responsive	Introduction to CSS	Jen
10	Terrarium	JavaScript Closures, DOM manipulation	Build the JavaScript to make the terrarium function as a drag/drop interface, focusing on closures and DOM manipulation	JavaScript Closures, DOM manipulation	Jen
11	Typing Game	Build a Typing Game	Learn how to use keyboard events to drive the logic of your JavaScript app	Event-Driven Programming	Christopher
12	Green Browser Extension	Working with Browsers	Learn how browsers work, their history, and how to scaffold the first elements of a browser extension	About Browsers	Jen
13	Green Browser Extension	Building a form, calling an API and storing variables in local storage	Build the JavaScript elements of your browser extension to call an API using variables stored in local storage	APIs, Forms, and Local Storage	Jen
14	Green Browser Extension	Background processes in the browser, web performance	Use the browser's background processes to manage the extension's icon; learn about web performance and some optimizations to make	Background Tasks and Performance	Jen
15	Space Game	More Advanced Game Development with JavaScript	Learn about Inheritance using both Classes and Composition and the Pub/Sub pattern, in preparation for building a game	Introduction to Advanced Game Development	Chris
16	Space Game	Drawing to canvas	Learn about the Canvas API, used to draw elements to a screen	Drawing to Canvas	Chris
17	Space Game	Moving elements around the screen	Discover how elements can gain motion using the cartesian coordinates and the Canvas API	Moving Elements Around	Chris
18	Space Game	Collision detection	Make elements collide and react to each other using keypresses and provide a cooldown function to ensure performance of the game	Collision Detection	Chris
19	Space Game	Keeping score	Perform math calculations based on the game's status and performance	Keeping Score	Chris
20	Space Game	Ending and restarting the game	Learn about ending and restarting the game, including cleaning up assets and resetting variable values	The Ending Condition	Chris
21	Banking App	HTML Templates and Routes in a Web App	Learn how to create the scaffold of a multipage website's architecture using routing and HTML templates	HTML Templates and Routes	Yohan
22	Banking App	Build a Login and Registration Form	Learn about building forms and handing validation routines	Forms	Yohan
23	Banking App	Methods of Fetching and Using Data	How data flows in and out of your app, how to fetch it, store it, and dispose of it	Data	Yohan
24	Banking App	Concepts of State Management	Learn how your app retains state and how to manage it programmatically	State Management	Yohan

Offline access

You can run this documentation offline by using Docsify. Fork this repo, install Docsify on your local machine, and then in the root folder of this repo, type docsify serve. The website will be served on port 3000 on your localhost: localhost:3000.

PDF

A PDF of all of the lessons can be found here

Other Curricula

Our team produces other curricula! Check out:

• Machine Learning for Beginners
• IoT for Beginners
• Data Science for Beginners