The objective of this course is to teach everyone the basics of programming computers using Python. We cover the basics of how one constructs a program from a series of simple instructions in Python.

The course has no pre-requisites and avoids all but the simplest mathematics. Anyone with moderate computer experience should be able to master the materials in this course. It will cover Chapters 1-5 of the textbook “Python for Everybody”.  Once a student completes this course, they will be ready to take more advanced programming courses.

This Python 10-week course covers the basics of Python 3. The main lessons include Python Syntax and Semantics, Basic Programming Language, Computer Programming, Python Programming. In the first chapter we try to cover the “big picture” of programming so you get a “table of contents” of the rest of the book.

These are the course-wide materials as well as the first part of Chapter One where we explore what it means to write programs. We finish Chapter One and have the quiz and first assignment in the third week of the class. Throughout the course, you may want to come back and look at these materials. This section should not take you an entire week.

Don’t worry if not everything makes perfect sense the first time you hear it.

The goal of this course is to take you, you beautiful front end developer you, from someone with very little or no jQuery or JavaScript knowledge and up you to someone who is quite comfortable working with and writing jQuery and JavaScript.

There are other courses out there, this one is mine. We’ll make mistakes along the way. We’ll fix them. We’ll talk about theory. We’ll build practical, real things.

jQuery is monstrous in its popularity and ubiquity on the web. It doesn’t do everything, but what it does it does very well and that makes it part of nearly every major websites toolkit.

It is great at all the “DOM” stuff – selecting and manipulating elements on the page. It’s great at handling events. It has a nice API for all kinds of stuff – the “chaining” idea is very nice. It helps tremendously with Ajax. It helps with animation. The world of plugins around it is vast. While doing all this, perhaps the most compelling feature is that it handles the cross-browser problems for you.

We’ll talk about all that in more in this course.

JavaScript

JavaScript is the programming language of HTML and the Web. JavaScript is easy to learn. This tutorial will teach you JavaScript from basic to advanced.

Examples in Each Chapter

With our “Try it Yourself” editor, you can edit the source code and view the result.
We recommend reading this tutorial, in the sequence listed in the left menu.

Learn by Examples

Examples are better than 1000 words. Examples are often easier to understand than text explanations.

This tutorial supplements all explanations with clarifying “Try it Yourself” examples.

If you try all the examples, you will learn a lot about JavaScript, in a very short time!

Why Study JavaScript?

JavaScript is one of the 3 languages all web developers must learn:

1. HTML to define the content of web pages
2. CSS to specify the layout of web pages
3. JavaScript to program the behavior of web pages

Web pages are not the only place where JavaScript is used. Many desktop and server programs use JavaScript. Node.js is the best known. Some databases, like MongoDB and CouchDB, also use JavaScript as their programming language.

Did You Know?

JavaScript and Java are completely different languages, both in concept and design.

JavaScript was invented by Brendan Eich in 1995, and became an ECMA standard in 1997.
ECMA-262 is the official name of the standard. ECMAScript is the official name of the language.

You can read more about the different JavaScript versions in the chapter JS Versions.

Learning Speed

In this tutorial, the learning speed is your choice.

Everything is up to you.

If you are struggling, take a break, or reread the material.

Always make sure you understand all the “Try-it-Yourself” examples.

JavaScript References

W3Schools maintains a complete JavaScript reference, including all HTML and browser objects.

The reference contains examples for all properties, methods and events, and is continuously updated according to the latest web standards.

Complete JavaScript Reference.