Node.js is a program that lets us run JavaScript code outside browsers – which we can use for a variety of things.

A shell provides a text-based way of interacting with the operating system. In this chapter, we explore how shells work and why we need them for web development.

CSS provides a variety of services for web content: In the previous chapter, we used it to format content: to change colors, typefaces, etc. In this chapter, we will use it to lay out content: to place HTML elements on a page.

In the previous chapter, we used HTML to create unformatted content. In this chapter, we use CSS to configure the style of that content: We can change the color of the background, use various fonts, add vertical spacing, etc. This chapter covers a lot of ground relatively quickly: It’ll be fun to ex...

I was looking for a way to create images (think screenshots) of CSS layouts that I can use in HTML, EPUB and PDF files. This blog post describes my solution – which produces SVG images.

In this blog post, I’d like to talk about CSS: I wish it supported inner breakpoints – breakpoints not for viewports or containers but for HTML elements inside viewports or containers.

In this chapter, we learn how to create web pages via HTML.

In this chapter, we perform a few steps to prepare us for web development.

In this chapter, we learn how to use the version control system Git and a useful companion website, GitHub. Both are important tools when programming in teams but even help programmers who work on their own.

In this chapter, we explore Markdown, a lightweight markup language that’s easy to learn and used a lot when writing about programming: documentation, comments, etc. We’ll need it in the next chapter. Learning it may seem like a detour but it’s easy to pick up and you’ll come across it often if you ...

In this chapter, we install a package manager. That gives us access to all kinds of software.

In this chapter, we learn how to write a server that lets users log in via passwords. That process is called authentication.

In this chapter, we’ll write our own web server: It will serve files and manage the data for a browser app.

In this chapter, we’ll take a look at frontend frameworks – libraries that help with programming web user interfaces (“frontend” means “browser”, “backend” means “server”). We’ll use the frontend framework Preact to implement the frontend part of a todo list app – whose backend part we’ll implement ...

In this chapter we develop a small web app in the same way that large professional web apps are developed: We use libraries that we install via npm. We write tests for some of the functionality. We combine all JavaScript code into a single file before we serve the web app. That is called bundling. (...

In this chapter, we learn how to handle tasks that take a long time to complete – think downloading a file. The mechanisms for doing that, Promises and async functions are an important foundation of JavaScript and enable us to do a variety of interesting things.

In this chapter, we explore the popular data format JSON. And we implement shell commands via Node.js that read and write files.

In this chapter, we’ll explore the data structure Map (a class) which lets us translate (“map”) from an input value to an output value. We’ll use a Map to display text upside-down in a terminal!

In this chapter, we look at exceptions in JavaScript. They are a way of handling errors. We’ll need them for the next chapter.

In this blog post, we discuss Oracle’s trademark of the word “JavaScript”: What are the problems caused by that trademark? How can we fix those problems?

In this chapter, we learn how to create plain objects with properties. We use them to create a simple flash card app.

So far, all of our JavaScript code resided in a single file – be it an .html file or a .js file. In this chapter, we learn how to split it up into multiple files. And how to automatically test if the code we write is correct.

In this chapter, we run a web server on our own computer and use it to serve a web app.

In this chapter, we learn how to do things repeatedly in JavaScript.

In this chapter, we learn about tools for only running a piece of code if a condition is met: truth values (booleans), comparisons and if statements.

In this chapter we look at one way of storing more than one value in a variable: arrays.

In the last chapter, we worked with numbers. In this chapter, we’ll work with text and write our first applications.

In this chapter, we take the very first steps with JavaScript and learn about numbers, variables and functions.

This blog post provides an overview of my new series of blog posts called “Web development for beginners”.

On 25 June 2025, the 129th Ecma General Assembly approved the ECMAScript 2025 language specification (press release, GitHub release), which means that it’s officially a standard now. This blog post explains what’s new.