Why Learn Web Development?

A recent Forbes article estimated that the internet has over 1 billion websites today, with a new website built every 3 seconds. Most businesses prioritize having a web presence, with applications like e-commerce and entertainment continuing to drive traffic on mobile and desktop devices. This makes web development a very useful skill to have in your resume!

So, what programming language should you learn, to get started on this path? Building web apps starts with learning three fundamental technologies – HTML, CSS & JavaScript. These give you the skills you need to structure and style web pages and bring them to life with rich interactions that will enhance your users’ experience. The developer community agrees. In the past few years, JavaScript has continued to remain at the top of the GitHub Octoverse report for programming languages in terms of both popularity and usage.

How can you get started?

There are a number of resources available today to help you get started – including this free open-source curriculum built by Microsoft Cloud Advocates a few years back. This focused on a project-based learning approach that takes you from concepts to code understanding in practical ways that help you build your intuition through hands-on coding.

Since then, we have seen the adoption of new tools and technologies from development containers (like GitHub Codespaces) to AI assistance (with GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT) that don’t just improve our productivity as developers, but also help us establish continuous learning habits by giving us explanations, helping us fix issues interactively, and sharing “meta-prompts” related to our queries so we can expand our knowledgebase intuitively.

With our new LinkedIn Learning course “HTML, CSS and Javascript: Building The Web”, we revisit the core web technologies with project-based learning and AI assisted development in mind. Go from learning core building blocks, to coding hands-on projects, to learning how AI can be used to expand your understanding and streamline your development.

How is the course structured?

The course is divided into 6 lessons that take you from concept to code. Here is what you can expect for each lesson:

Short Videos – Each lesson consists of a series of short videos that explain a single concept or exercise for easy understanding.
GitHub Repo – The course is accompanied by a GitHub repo that has the starter code and tools required to follow along. Simply fork the repo to get started.
AI Assistance – The course has added segments that help you explore new AI tools like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT alongside your development journey.

Plus, the repo is instrumented with a dev container. Just launch GitHub Codespaces and get a pre-built development environment ready for your use as a sandbox for exploration.

Lessons At a Glance

The course has 6 main lessons, each with multiple videos for a total viewing time of under 4 hours. Here is what we cover:

Welcome To Your Development Environment – Learn about core developer tools used in the course · Get started with GitHub Codespaces.
HTML Development – Learn about document structure, organization and features like accessibility · Put them all together in a starter project.
CSS Styling – Learn about stylesheets, cascading and inheritance, selectors and layouts, transitions and animations · Use them to style the project.
JavaScript Development – Learn about the DOM, understand variables, functions, closures and event handling · Make your project interactive.
Coding Projects – Adopt the “build to learn” mindset · Understand event-based programming · Understand game mechanics and 2D game development.
AI-Assisted Development – Adopt the “AI-Assisted Learning” mindset · Explore GitHub Copilot · Explore ChatGPT · Explore useful prompts for learning.
Conclusion – That’s a wrap! Let’s talk about resources to keep going.

By the end of the course, it is our hope that you walk away with three things:

A basic understanding of the building blocks of web development (HTML, CSS, JS)
A sandbox dev environment with starter projects (for self-guided exploration)
An intuitive sense for AI-assisted development (debug, explainers & productivity)

Join Us Today!

New to Linked-In Learning? You can start a free 1-month trial here.
Have feedback? You can find us on Linked In @nityan and @jasminegreenaway.

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