In this chapter, we learn how to use the version control system Git and a useful companion website, GitHub. Both are important tools when programming in teams but even help programmers who work on their own.

In this chapter, we explore Markdown, a lightweight markup language that’s easy to learn and used a lot when writing about programming: documentation, comments, etc. We’ll need it in the next chapter. Learning it may seem like a detour but it’s easy to pick up and you’ll come across it often if you are interested in web development.

In this chapter, we install a package manager for our operating system. That enables us to install shell commands that we can’t get via npm.

In this chapter, we learn how to write a server that lets users log in via passwords. That process is called authentication.

In this chapter, we’ll write our own web server: It will serve files and manage the data for a browser app.

In this chapter, we’ll take a look at frontend frameworks – libraries that help with programming web user interfaces (“frontend” means “browser”, “backend” means “server”). We’ll use the frontend framework Preact to implement the frontend part of a todo list app – whose backend part we’ll implement in a future chapter.

In this chapter we develop a small web app in the same way that large professional web apps are developed:

• We use libraries that we install via npm.
• We write tests for some of the functionality.
• We combine all JavaScript code into a single file before we serve the web app. That is called bundling. (Why we do that it explained later.)

In this chapter, we learn how to handle tasks that take a long time to complete – think downloading a file. The mechanisms for doing that, Promises and async functions are an important foundation of JavaScript and enable us to do a variety of interesting things.

In this chapter, we explore the popular data format JSON. And we implement shell commands via Node.js that read and write files.

In this chapter, we’ll explore the data structure Map (a class) which lets us translate (“map”) from an input value to an output value. We’ll use a Map to display text upside-down in a terminal!