Programming for the Web with JavaScript

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This course is a part of Computer Science Essentials for Software Development, a 4-course Professional Certificate series from edX.

JavaScript is the programming language of the World Wide Web.

As a professional web software developer, you will not only need to know how to program in this simple yet powerful language, but you will need to understand the fundamentals of how data is exchanged on the World Wide Web (WWW) and what tools and frameworks are available to you for creating robust, interactive web applications.

This course, part of the CS Essentials for Software Development Professional Certificate program, provides an introduction to modern web development using JavaScript. In addition to exploring the basics of web page creation using HTML and CSS, you will learn advanced web page layout and responsive design tools such as Bootstrap. You will also learn how browsers represent a web page data using the Document Object Model (DOM) and how to develop dynamic, interactive web pages using JavaScript in the browser. Beyond fundamental JavaScript syntax and advanced language features such as callbacks, events, and asynchronous programming, you will work with jQuery, which provides functionality for simplified DOM manipulation and event handling.

This course will also introduce you to modern web frameworks and component-based libraries such as React.js for efficiently developing modular web page components, and D3.js for creating data-driven documents. We will also teach you how to represent and exchange data using JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), and how to access RESTful APIs on the web.

Server-side JavaScript is becoming more prevalent in the industry, with web frameworks such as Node.js and Express making it simple to create and deploy complex, data-driven web applications. This course will prepare you to use such frameworks and show you how to integrate them with NoSQL databases such as MongoDB.

What you'll learn

• The basics of how the World Wide Web allows browsers to send and retrieve web content
• Web browser internals, the Document Object Model (DOM), and jQuery
• How to create dynamic, interactive web pages using JavaScript
• Techniques for creating data-driven websites using modern web technologies
• Client-side JavaScript libraries and frameworks
• Server-side JavaScript application architecture, middleware, HTTP, and RESTful API design