Web Development for Beginners - A Curriculum

Learn the fundamentals of web development with our 12-week comprehensive course by Microsoft Cloud Advocates. Each of the 24 lessons dives into JavaScript, CSS, and HTML through hands-on projects like terrariums, browser extensions, and space games. Engage with quizzes, discussions, and practical assignments. Enhance your skills and optimize your knowledge retention with our effective project-based pedagogy. Start your coding journey today!

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Follow these steps to get started using these resources:

Fork the Repository: Click
Clone the Repository: git clone https://github.com/microsoft/Web-Dev-For-Beginners.git
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🌐 Multi-Language Support

Supported via GitHub Action (Automated & Always Up-to-Date)

Prefer to Clone Locally?

This repository includes 50+ language translations which significantly increases the download size. To clone without translations, use sparse checkout:
git clone --filter=blob:none --sparse https://github.com/microsoft/Web-Dev-For-Beginners.git
cd Web-Dev-For-Beginners
git sparse-checkout set --no-cone '/*' '!translations' '!translated_images'
This gives you everything you need to complete the course with a much faster download.

If you wish to have additional translations languages supported are listed here

🧑‍🎓 Are you a student?

Visit Student Hub page where you will find beginner resources, Student packs and even ways to get a free certificate voucher. This is the page you want to bookmark and check from time to time as we switch out content monthly.

📣 Announcement - New GitHub Copilot Agent mode challenges to complete!

New Challenge added, look for “GitHub Copilot Agent Challenge 🚀” in most chapters. That’s a new challenge for you to complete using GitHub Copilot and Agent mode. If you haven’t used Agent mode before it’s capable of not just generating text but can also create and edit files, run commands and more.

📣 Announcement - New Project to build using Generative AI

New AI Assistant project just added, check it out project

📣 Announcement - New Curriculum on Generative AI for JavaScript was just released

Don’t miss our new Generative AI curriculum!

Visit https://aka.ms/genai-js-course to get started!

Background

Lessons covering everything from basics to RAG.
Interact with historical characters using GenAI and our companion app.
Fun and engaging narrative, you’ll be time traveling!

character

Each lesson includes an assignment to complete, a knowledge check and a challenge to guide you on learning topics like:

Prompting and prompt engineering
Text and image app generation
Search apps

Visit https://aka.ms/genai-js-course to get started!

🌱 Getting Started

Teachers, we have included some suggestions on how to use this curriculum. We’d love your feedback in our discussion forum!

Learners, for each lesson, start with a pre-lecture quiz and follow through with reading the lecture material, completing the various activities and check your understanding with the post-lecture quiz.

To enhance your learning experience, connect with your peers to work on the projects together! Discussions are encouraged in our discussion forum where our team of moderators will be available to answer your questions.

To further your education, we highly recommend exploring Microsoft Learn for additional study materials.

📋 Setting up your environment

This curriculum has a development environment ready to go! As you get started you can choose to run the curriculum in a Codespace (a browser-based, no installs needed environment), or locally on your computer using a text editor such as Visual Studio Code.

Create your repository

For you to easily save your work, it is recommended that you create your own copy of this repository. You can do this by clicking the Use this template button at the top of the page. This will create a new repository in your GitHub account with a copy of the curriculum.

Follow these steps:

Fork the Repository: Click on the “Fork” button at the top-right corner of this page.
Clone the Repository: git clone https://github.com/microsoft/Web-Dev-For-Beginners.git

Running the curriculum in a Codespace

In your copy of this repository that you created, click the Code button and select Open with Codespaces. This will create a new Codespace for you to work in.

Codespace

Running the curriculum locally on your computer

To run this curriculum locally on your computer, you will need a text editor, a browser and a command line tool. Our first lesson, Introduction to Programming Languages and Tools of the Trade, will walk you through various options for each of these tools for you to select what works best for you.

Our recommendation is to use Visual Studio Code as your editor, which also has a built-in Terminal. You can download Visual Studio Code here.

Clone your repository to your computer. You can do this by clicking the Code button and copying the URL:

CodeSpace

Then, open Terminal within Visual Studio Code and run the following command, replacing <your-repository-url> with the URL you just copied:
```
git clone <your-repository-url>
```
Open the folder in Visual Studio Code. You can do this by clicking File > Open Folder and selecting the folder you just cloned.

Recommended Visual Studio Code extensions:

Live Server - to preview HTML pages within Visual Studio Code

Copilot - to help you write code faster

📂 Each lesson includes:

optional sketchnote
optional supplemental video
pre-lesson warmup quiz
written lesson
for project-based lessons, step-by-step guides on how to build the project
knowledge checks
a challenge
supplemental reading
assignment
post-lesson quiz

A note about quizzes: All quizzes are contained in the Quiz-app folder, 48 total quizzes of three questions each. They are available here the quiz app can be run locally or deployed to Azure; follow the instruction in the quiz-app folder.

🗃️ Lessons

	Project Name	Concepts Taught	Learning Objectives	Linked Lesson	Author
01	Getting Started	Introduction to Programming and Tools of the Trade	Learn the basic underpinnings behind most programming languages and about software that helps professional developers do their jobs	Intro to Programming Languages and Tools of the Trade	Jasmine
02	Getting Started	Basics of GitHub, includes working with a team	How to use GitHub in your project, how to collaborate with others on a code base	Intro to GitHub	Floor
03	Getting Started	Accessibility	Learn the basics of web accessibility	Accessibility Fundamentals	Christopher
04	JS Basics	JavaScript Data Types	The basics of JavaScript data types	Data Types	Jasmine
05	JS Basics	Functions and Methods	Learn about functions and methods to manage an application’s logic flow	Functions and Methods	Jasmine and Christopher
06	JS Basics	Making Decisions with JS	Learn how to create conditions in your code using decision-making methods	Making Decisions	Jasmine
07	JS Basics	Arrays and Loops	Work with data using arrays and loops in JavaScript	Arrays and Loops	Jasmine
08	Terrarium	HTML in Practice	Build the HTML to create an online terrarium, focusing on building a layout	Introduction to HTML	Jen
09	Terrarium	CSS in Practice	Build the CSS to style the online terrarium, focusing on the basics of CSS including making the page responsive	Introduction to CSS	Jen
10	Terrarium	JavaScript Closures, DOM manipulation	Build the JavaScript to make the terrarium function as a drag/drop interface, focusing on closures and DOM manipulation	JavaScript Closures, DOM manipulation	Jen
11	Typing Game	Build a Typing Game	Learn how to use keyboard events to drive the logic of your JavaScript app	Event-Driven Programming	Christopher
12	Green Browser Extension	Working with Browsers	Learn how browsers work, their history, and how to scaffold the first elements of a browser extension	About Browsers	Jen
13	Green Browser Extension	Building a form, calling an API and storing variables in local storage	Build the JavaScript elements of your browser extension to call an API using variables stored in local storage	APIs, Forms, and Local Storage	Jen
14	Green Browser Extension	Background processes in the browser, web performance	Use the browser’s background processes to manage the extension’s icon; learn about web performance and some optimizations to make	Background Tasks and Performance	Jen
15	Space Game	More Advanced Game Development with JavaScript	Learn about Inheritance using both Classes and Composition and the Pub/Sub pattern, in preparation for building a game	Introduction to Advanced Game Development	Chris
16	Space Game	Drawing to canvas	Learn about the Canvas API, used to draw elements to a screen	Drawing to Canvas	Chris
17	Space Game	Moving elements around the screen	Discover how elements can gain motion using the cartesian coordinates and the Canvas API	Moving Elements Around	Chris
18	Space Game	Collision detection	Make elements collide and react to each other using keypresses and provide a cooldown function to ensure performance of the game	Collision Detection	Chris
19	Space Game	Keeping score	Perform math calculations based on the game’s status and performance	Keeping Score	Chris
20	Space Game	Ending and restarting the game	Learn about ending and restarting the game, including cleaning up assets and resetting variable values	The Ending Condition	Chris
21	Banking App	HTML Templates and Routes in a Web App	Learn how to create the scaffold of a multipage website’s architecture using routing and HTML templates	HTML Templates and Routes	Yohan
22	Banking App	Build a Login and Registration Form	Learn about building forms and handling validation routines	Forms	Yohan
23	Banking App	Methods of Fetching and Using Data	How data flows in and out of your app, how to fetch it, store it, and dispose of it	Data	Yohan
24	Banking App	Concepts of State Management	Learn how your app retains state and how to manage it programmatically	State Management	Yohan
25	Browser/VScode Code	Working with VScode	Learn how to Using a code editor	Use VScode Code Editor	Chris
26	AI Assistants	Working with AI	Learn how to build your own AI assistant	AI Assistant project	Chris

🏫 Pedagogy

Our curriculum is designed with two key pedagogical principles in mind:

project-based learning
frequent quizzes

The program teaches the fundamentals of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, as well as the latest tools and techniques used by today’s web developers. Students will have the opportunity to develop hands-on experience by building a typing game, virtual terrarium, eco-friendly browser extension, space-invader-style game, and a banking app for businesses. By the end of the series, students will have gained a solid understanding of web development.

🎓 You can take the first few lessons in this curriculum as a Learn Path on Microsoft Learn!

By ensuring that the content aligns with projects, the process is made more engaging for students and retention of concepts will be augmented. We also wrote several starter lessons in JavaScript basics to introduce concepts, paired with a video from the “Beginners Series to: JavaScript“ collection of video tutorials, some of whose authors contributed to this curriculum.

In addition, a low-stakes quiz before a class sets the intention of the student towards learning a topic, while a second quiz after class ensures further retention. This curriculum was designed to be flexible and fun and can be taken in whole or in part. The projects start small and become increasingly complex by the end of the 12-week cycle.

While we have purposefully avoided introducing JavaScript frameworks to concentrate on the basic skills needed as a web developer before adopting a framework, a good next step to completing this curriculum would be learning about Node.js via another collection of videos: “Beginner Series to: Node.js“.

Visit our Code of Conduct and Contributing guidelines. We welcome your constructive feedback!

🧭 Offline access

You can run this documentation offline by using Docsify. Fork this repo, install Docsify on your local machine, and then in the root folder of this repo, type docsify serve. The website will be served on port 3000 on your localhost: localhost:3000.

📘 PDF

A PDF of all of the lessons can be found here.

🎒 Other Courses

Our team produces other courses! Check out:

LangChain

Azure / Edge / MCP / Agents

Generative AI Series

Core Learning

Copilot Series

Getting Help

If you get stuck or have any questions about building AI apps. Join fellow learners and experienced developers in discussions about MCP. It’s a supportive community where questions are welcome and knowledge is shared freely.

If you have product feedback or errors while building visit:

License

This repository is licensed under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for more information.