Learn By Example: The Foundations of HTML, CSS & Javascript

Course details

Closures, prototypes, JSON, the DOM, selectors, inheritance in CSS and in Javascript, and first class functions - that's what this course is about.

This is not a course on Javascript frameworks - its about solid, fundamental HTML, CSS and Javascript. You'll be surprised by how much more you can get done on your web pages once you learn these technologies the right way.

What do we mean by that?

• Relatively few folks formally learn HTML, CSS or Javascript, because its quite easy to get stuff done in these technologies in a "quick-and-dirty way".

• That "quick-and-dirty" way of learning and doing leads to problems over time, because Javascript and CSS are actually quite complex, so it is easy to do things the wrong way

• This course will help, because it has 75 examples, 20 in HTML/CSS and 55 in Javascript. Each is self-contained, has its source code attached, and gets across a simple, specific use-case. Each example is simple, but not simplistic.

What's Included:

• Basic HTML: Folks stopped counting HTML as a language worth formally learning sometime in the 90s, but this is only partially justified. It always helps to have strong basics.

• CSS: Cascading Stylesheets are incredibly powerful, and incredibly hard to use - until you know how they really work. Once you understand inheritance and selection in CSS, it will all make a lot more sense.

• Javascript is a full-fledged, powerful and complicated language. Its really important to learn Javascript formally, because it is just so different from most other languages you would have encountered. For instance - Javascript has objects and inheritance but no classes.

• Closures in Javascript are a rather mind-bending concept - functions that "remember" how the world looked when they were created.

• Prototypes are Javascript's way of doing inheritance, and its very different from the C++/Java way of doing it.

• JSON is not conceptually difficult to use, but it is incredibly important, and you should understand why - because its the glue between backends written in Java or other traditional languages, and front-ends written in Javascript

• The Document-Object-Model is what ties Javascript back to HTML and CSS. Together with JSON, the DOM ties it all together from server to skin.