Web Development for Beginners - A Curriculum

Learn the fundamentals of web development with our 12-week comprehensive course by Microsoft Cloud Advocates. Each of the 24 lessons dive into JavaScript, CSS, and HTML through hands-on projects like terrariums, browser extensions, and space games. Engage with quizzes, discussions, and practical assignments. Enhance your skills and optimize your knowledge retention with our effective project-based pedagogy. Start your coding journey today!

🧑‍🎓 Are you a student?

Visit Student Hub page where you will find beginner resources, Student packs and even ways to get a free certificate voucher. This is the page you want to bookmark and check from time to time as we switch out content monthly.

📣 Announcement - New Curriculum on Generative AI was just released!

Don't miss our NEW 12 lesson curriculum on generative AI!

Each lesson includes an assignment to complete, knowledge check and challenge to guide you on learning topics like:

• prompting and prompt engineering
• text and image app generation
• search apps

Visit https://aka.ms/genai-beginners to get started!

🌱 Getting Started

Teachers, we have included some suggestions on how to use this curriculum. We'd love your feedback in our discussion forum!

Learners, for each lesson, start with a pre-lecture quiz and follow through with reading the lecture material, completing the various activities and check your understanding with the post-lecture quiz.

To enhance your learning experience, connect with your peers to work on the projects together! Discussions are encouraged in our discussion forum where our team of moderators will be available to answer your questions.

To further your education, we highly recommend exploring Microsoft Learn for additional study materials.

📋 Setting up your environment

This curriculum has a development environment ready to go! As you get started you can choose to run the curriculum in a Codespace (a browser-based, no installs needed environment), or locally on your computer using a text editor such as Visual Studio Code.

Create your repository

For you to easily save your work, it is recommended that you create your own copy of this repository. You can do this by clicking the Use this template button at the top of the page. This will create a new repository in your GitHub account with a copy of the curriculum.

Running the curriculum in a Codespace

In your copy of this repository that you created, click the Code button and select Open with Codespaces. This will create a new Codespace for you to work in.

Running the curriculum locally on your computer

To run this curriculum locally on your computer, you will need a text editor, browser and command line tool. Our first lesson, Introduction to Programming Languages and Tools of the Trade, will walk you through various options for each of these tools for you to select what works best for you.

Our recommendation is to use Visual Studio Code as your editor, which also has a built-in Terminal. You can download Visual Studio Code here.

1. Clone your repository to your computer. You can do this by clicking the Code button and copying the URL:

   Then, open Terminal within Visual Studio Code and run the following command, replacing <your-repository-url> with the URL you just copied:

   git clone <your-repository-url>
   

2. Open the folder in Visual Studio Code. You can do this by clicking File > Open Folder and selecting the folder you just cloned.

Recommended Visual Studio Code extensions:

• Live Server - to preview HTML pages within Visual Studio Code
• Copilot - to help you write code faster

📂 Each lesson includes:

• optional sketchnote
• optional supplemental video
• pre-lesson warmup quiz
• written lesson
• for project-based lessons, step-by-step guides on how to build the project
• knowledge checks
• a challenge
• supplemental reading
• assignment
• post-lesson quiz

A note about quizzes: All quizzes are contained in this app, for 48 total quizzes of three questions each. They are linked from within the lessons but the quiz app can be run locally; follow the instruction in the quiz-app folder. They are gradually being localized.

🗃️ Lessons

	Project Name	Concepts Taught	Learning Objectives	Linked Lesson	Author
01	Getting Started	Introduction to Programming and Tools of the Trade	Learn the basic underpinnings behind most programming languages and about software that helps professional developers do their jobs	Intro to Programming Languages and Tools of the Trade	Jasmine
02	Getting Started	Basics of GitHub, includes working with a team	How to use GitHub in your project, how to collaborate with others on a code base	Intro to GitHub	Floor
03	Getting Started	Accessibility	Learn the basics of web accessibility	Accessibility Fundamentals	Christopher
04	JS Basics	JavaScript Data Types	The basics of JavaScript data types	Data Types	Jasmine
05	JS Basics	Functions and Methods	Learn about functions and methods to manage an application's logic flow	Functions and Methods	Jasmine and Christopher
06	JS Basics	Making Decisions with JS	Learn how to create conditions in your code using decision-making methods	Making Decisions