Introduction

The internet cuts across all walks of life. There are, of course, very successful companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter whose products are entirely web-based. But even traditional businesses need a strong web presence—as Marc Andreessen put it, "Software is eating the world." No surprise, then, that skilled web developers are in great demand!

Why learn this?

Whether you want to start a career in web development or pick up some skills you can use to express yourself creatively online, this free course will set you up for success. And if you ever feel like you need an extra boost of mentorship and career coaching to take your next step into becoming a professional web developer, look no further than Springboard's new Software Engineering Career Track.

What will you learn?

This learning path provides an overview of front-end and back-end technologies, as well as essential developer tools for troubleshooting, performance optimization, and collaboration. It covers the basics of web internals, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Python, Django, MySQL, Chrome Dev Tools, and Git. At the end of this course, you should be able to build a web application from scratch.

The challenge with learning web development is that it is not one beast, but many! Being a good web developer requires you to understand the many different components of a web application and how they interact with each other. The goal of this learning path is not to train you in the best technologies (in fact, what’s best is rather subjective depending on the application), but to pick one set that is powerful, yet simple to learn and gives you a flavour of how the various components interact.

Who is this for?

This course is designed for beginners and assumes no prior experience in web programming, but will get you building your own web apps by the end. Each topic has modules to teach you the basics. Feel free to skip or speed through parts that you are already familiar with.