The Complete Web Developer Course Review.
In this brief review, I will summarize the topics covered on this udemy course, and explain how and what I learned after completing all the exercises, lessons and projects. Click here to check out the course on Udemy by Andrei Neagoie.
How the internet works + History of the web.
As an introduction to web development, this first section makes you understand the underlying concepts and foundations of the internet, the history of the World Wide Web and how computers connect and communicate to each other. I didnt expect this section and it surprisingly hooked me up for the rest of the course.
HTML & CSS.
Continuing with the development foundations, of course there must be lessons on HTML5 and CSS3. The course covers the most important HTML tags, with excercises and quizzes. Then, you review basic styles with CSS, covering also CSS Grid, Flexbox and Responsive design. This section includes Bootstrap4 too, having you build a “startup” landing page connected to MailChimp. Personaly I went fast through this section as I already have studied and done simple web pages with these technologies. (Bonus Resource: Traversy Media - Modern HTML & CSS From The Beginning (Including Sass) Course)
Javascript.
Learning the most used programming language on the web for making interactive web apps is a big step. This section includes basic, intermediate and advanced exercises for learning JavaScript (and modern ECMAScript), which I managed to do relatively fast as I already had experience with advanced programming topics using Python. It also covers DOM manipualtion methods, giving you an assignment to make a background gradient generator with the topics learned just to this point.
Developer environment + tools.
This section reviews how to use certain tools for making the development process easier and more agile, just how software companies do. The tools are: the command line, Git and Github (and how to contribute to open source projects), NPM scripts, and using a code editor such as Visual Studio Code or Sublime Text.
React.js + Redux.
From this section, the lessons get closer to real-life development. Introducing React, a Javascript library that prevents many problems and makes developing the front-end easier. React makes manipulating the DOM more accesible and helps making more scalable apps by thinking in atomic components. Here you can code along with Andrei (the instructor) to create a react app, that consumes data from an API and filters the information displayed when the user makes changes in the input. I went through this section trying many learning strategies: I watched some lessons first and tried to recall how to code the same components, coded along (engaging in learning by repetition) and I tried to anticipate what and how to program the next part before watching the lesson. Here you can see the live app resulting from this section, deployed on my Github account!
HTTP/JSON/AJAX + Async Javascript.
Learning about communication protocols between computers in the web (HTTP/HTTPS), formatting of data (JSON) and asynchronous programming for faster websites and better user experience (AJAX & Async JS) is an essential part for better performing web apps. Learning and clarifying these topics helped me understand better how applications work underneath the hood.
Full Stack Final Project.
To wrap it all up, the course ends with a final big project. Building and deploying a complete web application that uses a machine learning API, where users can make accounts, upload images and get a count of recognized faces in those pictures. Keeping saved all the information in a PostgreSQL database, connected to a Node.js server using the Knex.js NPM package. The Front-end was developed with React.js.
This part is presented in a way that makes learning and understanding how to build a complete application from scratch very digestible, reinforcing good development practices (ie. Do not Repeat Yourself, and conventions when coding) starting with the Front-end part is like building the skeleton first, so you can literally see how the app should work on the server side and what functionalities it will require. React aids tremendously in that!
For developing the Back-end part of the app, first you learn the logic behind Node, RESTful APIs and using Postman for testing requests to the API, then you proceed to set up the server for your face-recognition-app, implementing user authentication methods, storing users passwords securely with Bcrypt and introducing the CORS method for web security. Then, in order to store safely user information, you go through an entire section on Databases, learnig how to create a PostGreSQL table that connects to the server for registering more users and logging in to the app.
Finally having implemented the front-end and back-end, the instructor guides you through a security and code review, then you are given the task to deploy the completed functional app to Heroku and see your work live on the internet.
Bonus: ZTM Community.
All ZTM (Zero To Mastery) Courses include access to the amazing community on Discord. There I found amazing support and motivation to keep learning about web development. When I was stucked in some parts of the course, I would ask there and get help very quickly, also I tried to help other people to give back and reinforce my learning. Without a doubt it is a very supportive community and definitely a big plus of the course!
