What is this?

This course will teach you full stack web development. It's even the title of the course. The first module will let you know what that even means, but for now let's say it means MAKING STUFF FOR THE INTERWEB. And yes, you can make a career out of this, like me, and you can get paid a lot to do it, like me and Jay-Z. Did I mention money? Web development pays pretty well right now and is exponentially more in-demand as years go by. Trust me, it's nuts.

What will you learn in this course? A full tour of the web development stack, from bare metal to pretty colors. Here's a basic overview:

HTML and CSS
Javascript and jQuery
Linux (Ubuntu, specifically)
PHP
MySQL
MongoDB

While those are very specific things, I'm going to try to incorporate broad concepts into it as well. For example, while learning Javascript and PHP you'll not only be learning those languages but the broad concepts of programming. Like variables, scope, functions, etc, that you can apply to other languages. There are even some bonus modules about regular expressions, node.js, and object-oriented programming.

How does one actually go through this course?

Going through the course means going through each of the Modules, one at a time, so when you're done reading this, head there!

This course is designed to be taken at your own pace. There's no schedule, but there are recommended timespans to keep things moving along. You should not linger on any piece for too long, though it may be challenging. It's not meant to be easy; programming is something that you can pick up in a few days, but it takes years (protip: decades) to really master from top to bottom. Likewise, there are no grades, at least not really. The assignments are meant to be guideposts. Test your knowledge, get better, try again.

By the way, this course is a lot of reading. So if you're scared of giant walls of text, maybe programming isn't right for you. I'm not a good illustrator, so I can't make neat comics about all of this.

Can I get course credit for this?

No. This is not an official course of Emerson College in any way, it's just a helpful set of guides strung together using this wonderful learning management system! If anything, you can think of this as a long series of Emerson IT Workshops put online for anyone to use.

Course Support

This course is intended to be open and always available, so it has no real grading or semesterly whateverness. If you need help with something, you have a few options: you can post on in the Discussions area, you can send me (Cyle Gage) a private message via Canvas, or you can try hitting me up via Twitter @cylegage.

Where did this come from?

This whole course is based very heavily on a series of guides I wrote on my own website. You can check those out at any time here: http://arepository.com/of/learning/ but they are subtly different than what's on this course. There are a few updates here that aren't on there, and in general, this is built as one linear sequence of modules.

Full Stack Web Development