New series of blog posts: learning web development

[2025-08-14] dev, javascript, learning web dev
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This blog post provides an overview of my new series of blog posts called “Learning web development”.

What do I need to learn for web development?  

In order to create a web app, you need to know about the following technologies:

  • HTML is used for specifying the content – what we see on a web page: text, images, etc.
  • CSS is used for specifying what the content looks like: layout, colors, etc.
  • JavaScript makes web pages truly interactive.
  • Servers are where the web pages are stored. They can also store data so that it lives outside web browsers, perform computations for web browsers, and more.

What does this series teach me?  

  • Required knowledge: HTML and CSS. MDN can teach you the basics of HTML and CSS. For this series, it’s enough if you have a rough, passive understanding of what’s going on: Don’t dig too deeply (at least not initially)!
  • We’ll create small, useful web apps – which teaches you:
    • Using JavaScript to create interactive web pages.
    • Deploying web sites publicly so that everyone can access them.
    • Creating web servers to store data, manage users, etc.

Table of contents  

  1. Numbers, variables, functions in JavaScript
  2. Strings and methods in JavaScript
  3. Arrays in JavaScript
  4. Booleans, comparisons and if statements in JavaScript
  5. Loops in JavaScript
  6. Shells and Node.js
  7. Web servers
  8. Modules and testing in JavaScript
  9. Plain objects in JavaScript
  10. JavaScript exceptions
  11. JavaScript Maps
  12. JSON and processing files in Node.js
  13. Asynchronous JavaScript – Promises and async functions

I’ll add more posts over time.

Downloading the repository with the projects  

Go to the GitHub repository learning-web-dev-code and follow the instructions there.

FAQ  

Where can I read background information on JavaScript?  

Check out these chapters in “Exploring JavaScript”:

What is the difference between JavaScript and ECMAScript?  

  • JavaScript is the name of the programming language.
  • ECMAScript is the name of the standard for JavaScript.

Why do I have to learn so many new terms (operator, operand, function, parameter, arguments, etc.)?  

Alas, if you want to learn how to program, in addition to learning how to write code, you also have to learn how to talk about code – so that you can communicate with other programmers, continue to learn more about programming, etc.

Do I have to be good at math?  

In practice, programming is usually surprisingly different from the math we learn at school.

Where can I go if I want to know more about a given JavaScript feature?  

In this series, I try not to overwhelm readers with details. If you are interested in details, you can check out my book “Exploring JavaScript” – which is free to read online.

Another useful source of web development information is “MDN Web Docs” (short: “MDN”).