Lesson

Indicates a written lesson focused on learning new material

Deployment

Deploying your MERN project with Heroku (using your Master Git Branch)

Heroku is an excellent service that specializes in making deployment of your web application quick and painless. Fortunately for us, it also has a free tier that will be perfect for our needs. There will only be a little bit of setup needed to get your web app up and

Web Applications

Token Auth with JWTs Part 1 - Server Setup

Note: If you haven't yet read through the Authentication Basics post, you should go read through it now before moving on. Intro What we'll be working with is a simple todo list organizer and adding user authentication on it so that a user will only see his/her todo items

Lesson

More on Data Types - Mutability and Value Types

Although this post doesn't cover concepts you'll necessarily need to understand on a day-to-day basis, the information it presents could potentially help you understand a bug that would otherwise be very difficult to debug. Value Types Every thing in JavaScript is one of two value types: primitive or reference type.

Lesson

CSS Box Model

Understanding the CSS box model will help you more as a web designer than just about any one other thing in CSS. Once you understand the difference between inline and block-level elements, the box model will begin to be easier to understand. Each concept is fairly straightforward to understand, so

Lesson

HTML Block vs. Inline and Important Elements

One major concept to grasp in HTML is the difference between block elements and inline elements. Block elements are those that take up the full width available on a web page, effectively blocking out any other elements from sitting next to it on the left or right. Inline elements are

Lesson

JavaScript Code Conventions and Best Practices

In JavaScript, having correct syntax means you're obeying the basic rules that allow JavaScript to be interpreted correctly. If you mess up and write incorrect syntax, your program will break. Code conventions are a little different than syntax though. Conventions are like the writing/style guides of programming languages. Most

Problem Solving

Problem Solving

Problem solving is the most important skill you will take out of this course. Without it, you are not truly a developer. You may have learned to repeat steps shown to you with a few minor changes but if you can't take that knowledge and apply it and mix it

Web Applications

Testing AngularJS Part 3 - Controllers with Dependencies

This post builds off of the previous post which covers setting up your Angular project with Karma, Jasmine, and ngMock, as well as testing a basic controller with no external dependencies. If you haven't gone through that one yet, you'll probably want to start there first. For repetition's sake, and

Web Applications

Testing AngularJS Part 2 - Efficient Unit Testing

This post takes a step down from covering syntax and processes for testing in AngularJS, and instead will wax a little philosophical. A clear understanding of the material presented in this post will lead you to avoid testing things that don't need to be tested and will save you time

Programming Principles

JavaScript Data Types & Function Arguments

JavaScript is made up of essentially two categories of data types with differing characteristics. Type 1: Primitive Data The primitive data types are: 1. Strings 2. Numbers 3. Booleans Primitive data types all share the characteristic of immutability, or the inability to be changed. All operations on primitive data types

Problem Solving

How to Solve It

Intro To Solving Problems Programming, particularly web development, is made up of numerous parts that require various bits of knowledge and skill to do. While this course will focus on the concrete skills of web development using JavaScript, AngularJS, Node and MongoDB, There is one skill that transcends all the

Web Applications

Testing AngularJS Part 1 - Karma, Jasmine, and ngMock

This is part of a series of posts on testing. If you haven't yet and you're new to testing in JavaScript, please read and follow along with the previous posts before moving on: 1. Testing Basics 2. Testing JavaScript with Jasmine 3. Karma It also assumes you're a relatively experienced

Programming Principles

Karma

As mentioned in the Testing Basics and Testing JavaScript with Jasmine posts, we'll be using the test runner Karma to run our JavaScript tests. When it comes time to test Angular code, we're going to need additional tools to help us deal with the AngularJS framework so we can test

Programming Principles

Testing Basics

The aim of this post is to help you gain the basic understanding of the principles and reasons behind testing, as well as to learn some basic testing terminology. What does "testing" mean in software development? Have you ever written a new feature into your code, and then had to

Web Applications

Testing JavaScript with Jasmine

Before we can begin testing our Angular applications, we need to gain an understanding of how testing JavaScript works in general. Testing options There are 3 very popular frameworks you can use for testing javascript: Jasmine, Mocha, and QUnit. They all essentially do the same thing, and even look almost

Web Applications

Token Auth with JWTs Part 3 - Security and UX - React + Redux

This is part 3 in a series of tutorials about authentication. If you haven't already, get some additional context by going through the other parts: 1. Authentication Basics 2. Token Auth with JWTs Part 1 - Server Setup 3. Token Auth with JWTs Part 2 - React + Redux SET UP

Web Applications

Token Auth with JWTs Part 2 - React + Redux

This is part 2 of a multi-part series on setting up user authentication in a MERN-stack application using JSON Web Tokens. If you haven't been following along, please visit the other posts for a full understanding of the current project: 1. Authentication Basics 2. Token Auth with JWTs Part 1

Web Applications

Authentication Basics

Authentication is the process of allowing a user of your application to create an account, sign in, have specific user permissions, get data that only concerns them as a user, etc. Authentication includes a security concern (we don't want people to be able to see or manipulate each other's data)

Mongoose

Mongoose Schema Basics

Understanding Schemas A "Schema" can be a tough thing to understand at first, but in reality it's pretty straightforward. A Schema for a database is akin to a "Class" in Object-Oriented Programming. Where a class is like a blueprint for creating objects in a program, a Schema is a blueprint

Mongoose

Mongoose CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete)

We've covered the basics of making queries in the MongoDB Shell, but since we'll mostly be writing our queries in our server's JavaScript code using Mongoose, it makes sense to understand how Mongoose does queries. We'll be covering basic CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations. With Mongoose, you can perform

Express

Express req.params and req.query

When you're first learning about the Request/Response cycle, there's a fairly confusing topic that you'll run into frequently: URL parameters and query parameters (also called query strings). The reason these can be confusing is because people frequently interchange the two terms. So we're going to clarify what they are

Node

Express Router

You have now experienced the beauty and simplicity of Node and Express - and you have created a few simple back-end servers and enabled your client to talk to it. How cool! So far we've been putting all of our routes on the app object that was created with the

Database

MongoDB Overview

A database is simply a storage mechanism for information. In the same way a warehouse stores physical inventory in rows, on shelves, in boxes, etc., a database stores data in it’s own organized way. The two types of database structures are relational (SQL) and non-relational (NoSQL). Relational vs. Non-Relational

Deployment

Deploying your MERN project with Heroku

Heroku is an excellent service that specializes in making deployment of your web application quick and painless. Fortunately for us, it also has a free tier that will be perfect for our needs. There will only be a little bit of setup needed to get your web app up and

Node

Node Module Patterns

There are a few different common patterns that are used to set up the structure of your modules in Node.js. We'll be discussing 5 such common patterns. One of the main things to know/remember, which will help you immensely as you're trying to understand these different patterns, is