Front-End Development Foundations

Course Overview & Technologies

The Front End Development Foundations class is designed for those with limited or no prior technical experience (or for those who may be out-of-date, or self-taught and needing a better technical foundation). If you want to become a software developer, front-end engineer, or web application developer, this is the place to learn what you need to know to start your career.

This course is an introduction to the standard languages of the web: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. You’ll learn to program using JavaScript—including advanced JavaScript concepts such as object-oriented programming, AJAX, and directly manipulating the DOM in the browser—as well as supporting technologies and frameworks to improve your productivity, such as Bootstrap, SASS, React, and others.

In addition to learning HTML, CSS and Javascript, you will learn the essential development tools of a front-end software engineer including editors, debuggers, testing frameworks/languages, source code control systems, etc. These include tools such as VIM, Chrome Developer Tools, Git and Github, Grunt, and others.

You will work on solo exercises, but you will also work collaboratively pair programming, and in larger teams. Real-world software development is a team sport so it is essential you learn how to work in a team environment to build and deliver working solutions.

At the end of the class, each student will identify a personal capstone project to develop, test and deploy. We believe that the essential credentials of the professional programmer are the code they have delivered, so all of the code that you create in this class will be visible in your personal GitHub repositories, especially your capstone project.

Why Learn These Technologies?

The core technologies in this class - HTML, CSS and JavaScript are THE standard technologies for anything that runs in a browser. These technologies are used to build and execute the front-ends to all major websites, web applications and even, increasingly, mobile applications. JavaScript is the most widely used programming language in the world. Period. These are also some of the cornerstone open technologies in the world - not controlled by any single vendor and now consistently supported by all major browser vendors.

At one time a few years ago JavaScript was mainly coded as an adjunct to other programming languages and there were a limited number of JavaScript-focused software engineer positions. That has changed dramatically with the rise of modern “Web 2.0” and beyond applications. Today, there are many jobs with titles such as Front-end Developer or Web Developer that are centered on using the web standard languages of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Around Nashville these jobs can be found in web development or marketing agencies, startups, emerging or growth stage tech companies, the IT departments of larger enterprises, etc.

What You’ll Learn