JavaScript Development

Written properly from the start, not corrected later.

• Values, types and the coercion traps hands on
  Why == surprises people, and why === removes the surprise.
• Functions, scope and closures hands on
  Closures explained until they are obvious, because everything later depends on them.
• Arrays and objects, and the methods worth knowing hands on
  map, filter, reduce, destructuring, spread.
• this, and why it moves
  The one piece of the language that reliably confuses beginners.

Making a page respond to a person.

• The DOM, selecting and changing hands on
  Reading the page as a tree and editing it.
• Events and delegation hands on
  Handling clicks on things that did not exist when the page loaded.
• Forms and validation hands on
  Client-side validation as a convenience, never as a control.
• Debugging with devtools hands on
  Breakpoints, the network tab, and reading a stack trace.

The part that separates confident developers from stuck ones.

• The event loop, explained visually
  Why an alert blocks and a fetch does not.
• Promises, async and await hands on
  Writing readable asynchronous code.
• fetch, and the three states of every request hands on
  Loading, loaded, failed — a UI that only handles the middle one is unfinished.
• Concurrency hands on
  Promise.all, races, and not firing forty requests at once.

How JavaScript is actually shipped.

• Modules, npm and package hygiene hands on
  Including how to judge whether a dependency is safe to add.
• Bundling with Vite hands on
  What a build step is doing and why.
• Linting and formatting
  Removing an entire category of argument from a team.
• Testing with Vitest hands on
  Writing the test that would have caught the bug you just fixed.

Node, and the same language on both sides.

• Node basics and the file system hands on
  Scripts that do real work outside a browser.
• Building a small API with Express hands on
  Routes, middleware, JSON in and out.
• Talking to a database hands on
  Queries, parameters, and SQL injection shown working then fixed.
• Environment config and secrets
  Keys that never enter git.

React as an application of everything above.

• Components, props and state hands on
  Recognising the patterns you already built by hand.
• Hooks and effects hands on
  Including the infinite re-render everyone writes once.
• Deploying hands on
  Getting it onto a real URL with HTTPS.

Before you start

• Free: Web Development Basics
  HTML and CSS are assumed from week one.

Where it leads

• MERN Stack
  The full-stack application of this language.
• Flutter / Mobile App
  For those who want to build for phones.

Roles this prepares you for

• Junior Front End Developer
  Building interfaces.
• JavaScript Developer
  Front end, back end or both.

Interested in this programme?

Try the subject free first — there is no reason to pay before you know you like it.