This blog on the top 20 web development courses takes you on a long journey. Long, not only in terms of the timespan it covers, but also from the standpoint of the magnitude of changes its theme has brought about into human life. When you go three decades back in history, it may not seem like a long time. But 30 years or whereabouts are like eternity when we talk about a technological development.
The core of this blog on the top 20 web development courses relates to a development that dates to 1989, when British scientist Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN, showed the world that everything about technology that was taking shape then, such as information, computers, hypertext, and the like, could be shared on a global platform in a collaborative effort, so that the whole process could transmit information at a pace and to a reach that was unknown till then.
This gave rise to what we now call the discipline of web development. Today, it has grown so quickly and profoundly out of the CERN labs that almost no human activity seems to be possible without web development. Everything and everyone from a hyperlocal grocer to the Interpol need web development today. So, what is it that is so impactful about this technology? Why has it made such a big difference to the way humans interact with each other, and why should you pursue a career in it by studying the top 20 web development courses?
Let us explore all these in some detail over the next few paragraphs. So, sit back and relax in your understanding of web development, and of the top 20 web development courses!
Let us start at the starting. Let us begin by first getting an idea of web development. In plain terms, we can think of web development as being the domain with which to create, build, and maintain websites. Web development is about creating applications that run over the Internet. The core ingredients of web development include web programming, design, publishing, and database management. To sum up, web development is what makes the running of websites possible.
The two words in this discipline are self-explanatory: web can refer to a website, webpage, or anything concerning the Internet; development is all about how to leverage web technologies that make the website perform functions. This may sound simple in terms of a literal description, but here is the full story: websites can range from being a single page creation to those that enable businesses from start to finish.
Can we imagine any business, or for that matter, any activity, that does not require the Internet? Think of all that you do using the Internet: ordering food, buying tickets, playing online games, buying clothes, getting documents from the government agencies…well, the list is endless, right?
This gives you some idea about the reach and the power of the worldwide web, or the www, and the Internet, which powers it. When you think of the journey web development has made from its early CERN days, the least that one can say is that it has grown beyond all reasonable, logical limits. And, it continues to grow. The BLS estimates that web development is projected to grow at 13 percent a year till at least 2030 from a base of nearly 200,000 professionals in 2020, offering an entry level median pay of over $77,000. This, I believe, is what makes this blog on the top 20 web development courses a perfect fit for those who want to work on the www in some or another way. Do these facts give you some perspective of web development?
Now, to the bare functionalities of a website. Naturally, as one can expect, the most important aspect of web development is in making the website agile and responsive, and integrating and synchronizing each of the functions into it in such a manner that it carries out all these seamlessly and responsively. That is the real challenge of web development, which is why I want to describe my pick of top 20 web development courses, which will give you a solid idea of how and where to begin your web development journey.
So, wish you the best for your chosen path. But wait, did I leave out a few details about web development? Ah yes, I did! I did not tell you a few more basic points about web development, which should really be the premise for why you should choose the top 20 web development courses. Which are these?
Here they go:
Frontend and backend are the two ways that make a website. A quick word about each of these: frontend is that part of a website that appears to the user to see and interact with. Design, text and social media, and monetary transactions are some of the frontend elements of a website. As can be clearly understood, these are what the user gets to see in the website, something like the exterior of an automobile. This is also called the client side of the website.
Broadly, these, along with their respective frameworks and libraries are what make the frontend of a website work:
- Html
- CSS
- JavaScript
And then, we could take note of these frameworks:
- AngularJS
- VueJS
- Tailwind CSS
- React.js
- jQuery
- jQuery UI
- Material UI
- Bootstrap
- Handlebar.js Backbone.js, Ember.js etc.
The backend, on the other hand, is the inner part of the website, which consists of a bunch of technologies, languages and frameworks, that go on to power the website and enable it to carry out its functions. To relate the same example as above, it is what resides inside the hood of an automobile. When you look at a car from outside, do you get an idea of how the engine works, what its power output is, or how the brakes function? No, right? The backend of a website is similar to this in this respect.
You may not see a single element physically, but it is impossible to imagine the website without these. Just like how the fitness and efficiency of these hidden parts go on to really define the automobile and make it work the way it does, the functionality and effectiveness of a website are unthinkable without a robust backend.
So, what about the powerhouses of the backend? Well, these are some of them:
- Java
- NodeJS
- PHP
- Python
A quick glance at some popular backend frameworks takes us to:
- Spring
- Rails
- Laravel
- Express
- Django, and the like.
The need for web development springs from the need for having a responsive website. Before I take you to the actual list of top 20 web development courses, let us get an understanding of why exactly a website needs to be responsive. Woven into this is a more basic issue: the definition of a responsive website.
How many times have you visited a website, first on a laptop, and then, the same website, on another device like a tablet or a mobile phone? On innumerable occasions, right? Did you feel any difference in the website’s layout, shape, look and feel, or its functions when you switched the devices? If you didn’t, this is the answer to the question of what a responsive website is. If the website did not alter any of its characteristics in response to and in relation to the device in which it is fitted, it means that it is responsive. That is, a responsive website is one that allows you to carry out all its functions effectively and with the same degree of ease, irrespective of the device on which it works.
Now, the second aspect of this point, which is, why you need to have a responsive website: the basic function of a website is to be able to adapt itself to any device without sacrificing any of its core or essential objectives. If it struggled with this, it means that it is not performing its functions rightly. This could put visitors off, which is the last thing a business or an enterprise or any organization would want.
And yes, being responsive also includes having another ability: resilience. As businesses grow and have to handle more needs from their customers, the websites need to be robust and capable of handling huge loads and being able to navigate across the different sections of the website effortlessly and painlessly. Imagine the disaster a business would go through if it has customers coming to its website, only to see them going away because this website sucks. So, being responsive is the primary aim of a website.
Armed with this basic information about web development, let us proceed to the main topic of this writeup, which is the top 20 web development courses. Here is my list:
1. Create a Blockchain with Microsoft Azure
This course will take you to the concepts of blockchain. You will learn to build smart contracts. It will teach you how to use Azure Blockchain Workbench to create your own smart contract, carry out roles and do transactions. This is imparted through a project in which four roles will be played out: owner, appraiser, buyer and inspector.
You will also learn how to create blockchain applications. It will cover the cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. One of the main takeaways from this course is that it will clear the confusion among many people-that blockchain and bitcoin are one and the same. From this course, you will also become familiar with Azure Active Directory and learn how to use different types of cloud computing services.
Learning from this course includes:
- Setting up Azure Blockchain Workbench
- Attaching Azure Blockchain Workbench with AAD
- Azure Blockchain Workbench dashboard
- Writing hello blockchain smart contract scripts (JS + sol)
- Creating blockchain application
- Adding users and creating asset transfer smart contract
- Creating and terminating contract and deleting Workbench application.
2. How to Make a WordPress Website – Ultimate Guide (2019)
Guess how much it costs to build a website using html? $1. Yes, that is all it takes, and this course will show you how to put your dollar to its best use in creating a WordPress website. It will run you through the processes for this, such as installing WordPress plugins, by which you can have your own, fully functional modern, and responsive WordPress website.
You will learn step-by-step how to build a WordPress site and do basic SEO for it. This will help your website grow. You will learn the techniques that have helped 10,000 people achieve success through this course.
These are what you will have gained by the time of completion of this course:
- Purchase your domain and hosting
- Install WordPress and learn how to use it
- Recommended plugins
- Install and customize a theme
- Easily create your website logo for FREE
- Basics of SEO.
3. Introduction to Maps in R Shiny and Leaflet
In this introductory course on Maps in R Shiny and Leaflet, everything that is considered useful for creating different types of maps will be taught. These include R Programming, Web Mapping, web GIS programming, working with data frames, web mapping with the Leaflet library, and building a GIS application.
It will teach you how to create a fully functional web GIS application using the R programming language. This GIS application will consist of different types of maps ranging from point maps to heatmaps, to choropleth maps.
You will learn how to use different datasets ranging from data frames to spatial data frames, with which data can be transformed and visualized on different types of maps, depending on the use case.
You will learn the skill needed to build sophisticated web map spatial data applications that almost anyone can interpret and understand. These include:
- Working with spatial data in the R programming language
- Installing and using R Studio
- Using the Leaflet web mapping library
- Building a dashboard in R Shiny
- Creating a variety of maps and integrating it into a single application
- Creating map legends and color palettes
- Styling maps using embedded html functions
- Using R terminal operations
- Working with data frames.
4. Getting Started with Redis
This course introduces you to Redis, the powerful and fast-growing NoSQL database. The ease of use of its interface, excellent documentation, and the ability to integrate a host of clients into an application make it a popular choice.
At this course, you will become familiar with the fundamental topics of Redis. You will understand how to install Redis, and get a demo of how to create a Redis Cluster and to make your Redis configuration highly available.
You will learn how to install Redis on your own machine or in a production environment. You will gain knowledge of the different Redis data types and how to use them. This knowledge will help you start writing code that integrates with Redis and create a Redis Cluster and a highly available Redis.
By the time you complete this course, you will have had a grasp of the fundamentals of Redis and will have been introduced to intermediate Redis concepts like Redis Security, Redis Cluster, and Redis Sentinel.
5. Create an Engaging Website with Twitter Bootstrap 2.x
Knowing how to use the free, open-source framework, Twitter Bootstrap 2.x helps you create interactive and engaging websites. Through as many as 23 lessons, this course will offer comprehensive learning of Twitter Bootstrap 2.x.
Through a step-by-step approach, this course will show you how to build a responsive, interactive, and visually engaging web page with simple and flexible HTML, CSS and JavaScript built on Twitter Bootstrap. You will understand how to leverage the many features of Twitter Bootstrap, such as creating your own layouts, customizing components, device-sensitive elements, auto-suggest form fields, and extending the icon sprite sheet to incorporate your own icons.
You can use the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Photoshop templates that this course comes with, to customize for your own projects. These are what this course will consist of:
- Introduction
- Adding the base markup for the page
- Adding your own style with CSS
- Creating your own icons
- Customizing the experience with plug-ins.
6. Unlock the Power of the In-Depth Features of cPanel
This course is on cPanel, the web hosting panel through which most websites are controlled. Through this panel, you can carry out operations and protect your website, but more often than not, this panel goes unnoticed or gets underutilized. This course will show you how to make optimal use of cPanel, so that your website is better controlled and protected.
You will learn MySQL, Awstats, Softaculus, Error and Redirect, File Manager, Email and Security, and Backup and Restore. As a result, you will be able to:
- Create a MySQL database without having to copy it to another site
- Use Awstats to improve your traffic quality and website
- Redirect your error pages to any page of your site without losing out on traffic
- Access File Manager and backup and restore your website.
7. Introduction to Front-End Development
You will gain a basic knowledge of the front-end development of a website. With the knowledge of html, CSS, and JavaScript that this course imparts, you will be able to build and style a page and feed it with the data from external data course.
You will to learn the history of html. You will understand and compare its different versions, and check the new features of html5 and CSS3.
With this course, you will be able to:
- Build simple html pages
- Add styles to the elements
- Change styles on fly with JavaScript
- Fill element with data from external file using jQuery.
8. From A Non-Programmer To Full Stack .NET Developer + FREE eBook
With this course, you will learn the basic concepts of programming, with which you will be able to develop basic C# backend applications. This course will also help you understand how to develop basic html, CSS, and JS frontend applications. The thing about this course is that it conditions you to think like a developer.
You will gain proper understanding of the many concepts related to web development, such as database, SQL, NoSQL, html, CSS, JavaScript, UI, frontend, backend, LINQ, REST, API, web development, hosting, IDE, T-SQL, and a host of related ones.
These are what you will be able to create with the learning from the quizzes and exercises that this course comes with:
- A database (SQL vs NoSQL)
- A UI, the frontend (html, CSS & JavaScript)
- An API
- A layer responsible with the logical processing of your application
- A layer responsible for executing operations against our database
You will also learn how to enable local hosting and test the application.
9. Angular With Practical Examples
Want to learn how to create app using Angular 2+? This course is for you. With several practical examples, this course will explain how to create an app using Angular 2+. You will learn project setup, page layout, local data source, how to import DB.ts, how to improve UI and search functionality, and many more.
10. Beginner’s Guide to Flask Web Framework
This course will teach you web applications and API fundamentals, with which you can start building API and web applications using Python Flask Web Framework.
This course will familiarize you everything from programming with Python to API’s development. You will also understand what web application development is, how to use Flask and Python, how to create Flask server, and how to connect to database and send and receive data in JSON format.
In addition to Python, Flask, and DB operations, you will learn how to handle static files and data, as well as exception handling.
11. Learning Path: React: Make Stunning React Websites
The soul of a website is its interface. Without it, a website is as good as nonexistent, because it fails to perform the most elementary of purposes for which a website is created: attracting and retaining visitors.
The UI aspects of a website are the most crucial element. This course will equip you with the knowledge needed to create different UI components for your sites such as buttons and jumbotrons. It will teach you the ways of creating button components using Bootstrap 4.0, create different visualizations from your data (charts, grids, maps, and more), and do lots more.
It will offer you the practical skills that make interface components attractive and which incorporate other web development tools, such as Bootstrap, SASS, and hot reloading. You will learn how to incorporate your data and display it on the web using a variety of techniques, such as charts and grids.
With this learning, you will learn how to beautify your React websites and React web apps. It will make you understand the logic behind the process, because of which you can make these work in real life, in your projects.
The learning from this course will help you:
- Create different UI components for your sites such as buttons and jumbotrons
- Understand how different types of data can be ingested into React
- Understand hot reloading to update pages as a result of interface interaction
- Explore deeper integrations with JSX and ES6 to create reusable components
- Create different visualizations from your data (charts, grids, maps, and more)
- Create button components using Bootstrap 4.0
12. Learning Path: Akka: Building Applications and Microservices with Akka
Akka, written in Scala, helps you build distributed systems that offer outstanding performance on local machines and remote networks alike. This tool is used in building distributed, concurrent, fault-tolerant and scalable applications.
This course offers a clear and practical introduction to the Akka toolkit. It will explain the key components you need to know to get up and running with developing applications of your own. The other aspects of learning include the actor system, how to create hierarchical structures in Akka, and how to make routes in order to send messages to other actors.
Practical use cases, such as building an actor that can change its behavior during runtime will be explained. This course will show you how to create stateful actors, work with a cluster system, and work with remote actors.
You will be able to build Reactive microservices using Akka and Akka HTTP, which adhere to the principles underlying the Reactive Manifesto. Concepts such as Responsive, Resilient, Elastic, and Message-Driven will be explained. You will be made to understand how microservices should be designed to adhere to those principles. By the time you complete this learning, you will be able to effortlessly create applications and microservices.
You will be able to:
- Explore Akka’s version of the actor model
- Find out how actors solve concurrency problems
- Build stateful actors with Akka Persistence
- Create microservices using Akka HTTP
- Write performance tests for your microservices.
13. Learn Google Fonts
Google Fonts is a very valuable tool in web development. With this tool, you can improve the esthetics of your website and add zing to it. Even those who are not web developers can use Google Fonts and customize it and edit webpages on their own without having to hire someone else to these tasks.
The lessons from this course will help you learn and master the use of Google Fonts. You will learn all the necessary skills and knowledge to quickly add Google Fonts to web pages. It will show you how to use Google Fonts for web development and web design.
The learning from this course will be through projects, which will make your learning strong. From this course, you will:
- Learn how to use Google Fonts for web development and web design
- Learn and master the use of Google Fonts
- Gain the necessary skills and knowledge to quickly add Google Fonts to web pages
- Download and install Firefox web browser for testing and debugging your web pages
- Download and install MAMP for working in a local web development environment
- Download and install Sublime Text 3 text editor for coding.
14. Learning JavaScript Data Structures and Algorithms
Data is the new oil. It is what powers entire organizations. Structuring software is very vital in this scenario. Using appropriate data structures and having a good understanding of algorithm analysis is key to writing maintainable and extensible quality software.
This course offers crucial learning on JavaScript data structures and algorithms, using which you can organize your code with the most appropriate data structures in a logical way that is easy to maintain, refactor, and test. The use of effective data structures helps you take advantage of advanced algorithms, which makes your web applications more powerful and scalable.
This course will introduce you to common software engineering data structures, such as linked-lists, trees, and graphs, and show you how to implement them in JavaScript. You will also master ways to use them in various types of algorithms.
With this practical course, you will be guided through a web application development cycle using a structured and disciplined approach, which focuses on accuracy and efficiency as you build quality software.
You will be able to:
- Master existing JavaScript collections such as arrays, sets, and maps
- Develop abstract data types to extend JavaScript into a more flexible and powerful programming language
- Grasp the basics of software engineering to differentiate yourself from undisciplined coders
- Conjure powerful algorithms to traverse dense graphs and trees in the least possible steps
- Devour the science of comparing different algorithms to choose the best one for the respective task
- Search and sort native and custom data types through collection iterator methods
- Create complex abstract data types by reusing existing classes.
15. Spring Security
Want to take an empirical approach to securing your web applications? This course is tailormade for you. interspersed with very lively real-life examples, this course is fun all the way.
You will learn different ways of empowering Spring Security for the web. You will learn to implement the authentication techniques comprising of login, registration, and logout.
You can implement the basic security for a web application starting with authentication and authorization techniques and dig deeper into the process of registration, from raw JDBC to the implementation of a more mature and production-ready Hibernate/JPA implementation.
You will build efficient, utilitarian, and immediately applicable security for your web application.
These are what are included in this learning:
- Spring Security Setup
- Registration
- The Remember Me Authentication
- Spring Security with LDAP
- Authorization with Spring Expressions
- REST Authentication and Authorization
- Spring Security ACL.
16. Getting Started with Magento
With this course, you will learn to use Magento, the world’s leading ecommerce platform, to build your own business website, with utmost ease.
All the aspects of Magento, from installation to configuration, customization, are taught at this course. You will learn to manage every aspect of your store’s front end and the customer’s experience.
This course will start with the very basics of installation. You will learn how to fill your store with products, create custom product types, and add simple or complex product types. Configuring your store to accept payment, process taxes, and handle shipping, are all taught. You can also modify and add pages, and change their layout and theme.
By the time of completion of this course, you will have a web store that is fully functional and ready for business online.
With this course, you will:
- Categorize and create product types to organize your store’s inventory
- Set up your store with a deep understanding of the available options and menu layouts
- Understand the entire process of installing Magento with and without sample data
- Use tax and shipping rules along with payment gateway integration to generate revenue, and understand the order process to manage and ship your sales
- Take control of your content and customize your product page’s layout
- Manage every aspect of your store, including ratings, reviews and tags
- Enhance your product pages with descriptions, images, and inventory information
- Create simple, complex, configurable, tangible, and virtual products to fill out your store’s inventory.
17. Learning Express Web Application Development
You will learn to use ExpressJS to build powerful and modern web apps that run smoothly on the webserver. This course will guide you through building a real-world web application using NodeJS, Express, and MongoDB.
Starting with how to use the Jade template library and Bootstrap framework to create clean and maintainable code for your app, this course will move on to show you how to put MongoDB to work, store data for your app, and incorporate best-practices such as modularization. Next, you will progress to more advanced concepts steps like authentication, test-driven-development, and incorporating powerful time-saving tools to get the app ready for deploying.
Also taught are CSS preprocessors, which help create RESTful services that make the best of MVC libraries and give that added zing to your app. By the time you complete this course, you will be equipped with the expertise to start building and deploying web applications of your own.
You will be able to:
- Utilize CSS pre-processors such as Stylus, Sass, and Less to speed up your app’s CSS development
- Use the Jade template and keep your markup clean and simple
- Manage dependencies and automate common tasks effectively with Node.js and NPM
- Get the best storage features with a fast document-based database, for example, MongoDB, and MongooseJS, a powerful yet easy to use library
- Get a lot more with additional popular tools such as Socket.io, SailsJS, and the Ghost blogging platform
- Enable authentication using standard measures and extend it to allow Facebook or Twitter logins
- Create RESTful services compatible with client-side MVC libraries such as Angular, Backbone, and Ember
- Create modules to keep your code clean, reusable, and easy to manage
- Incorporate test-driven development tools to automate the testing of your application.
18. Learning Knockout.JS
Using real world examples, this course will help you create powerful data-driven web applications using Knockout.JS, a versatile JavaScript library. It stands out because it uses the Model-View-View-Model (MVVM) design pattern to build data-driven web applications.
With this course, you will be able to construct power-packed apps without compromising on their flexibility. You can build rich user interfaces which update in real-time when the data model state changes, thus eliminating the need to refresh pages.
This course will walk you through all of the key features of Knockout.JS, with which it will become a lot easier for you to quickly and easily build feature-and data-rich web applications that can be extended and maintained.
These are the takeaways from this course:
- Use the popular MVVM design pattern to separate the concerns of your applications
- Boost your JavaScript skills with the Module and Revealing Module patterns
- Build complex UI structures easily through the use of Knockout’s template features
- Create computed observables to enhance interactions between model data and the UI
- Master and implement the concept of data context to get even more out of your UI
- Work with model data in the UI using Knockout’s data-binding syntax to manage data efficiently
- Expand your Knockout.JS skill set through the use of custom functions, bindings, and extenders
- Preview the advanced features of Knockout.JS and launch your skills to the next level.
19. Introducing Ionic 2
This course will show you how to leverage the power of the powerful mobile application frameworks, Ionic 2 and Angular 2, to build an attractive and fully-featured mobile app. With this course, you will have the same experience as building a real application, from scratch to a working product. It will show you how to make your development fast, structured, and at the same time, incredibly enjoyable.
This course will teach you to:
- Make API calls and circumvent cross-origin restrictions with JSONP
- Master the emulator and native loader options to see the final application while building it
- Keep your code structured and reusable by implementing separation of concerns
- Keep the user experience as close to native applications as possible using visual aids such as modal and actionSheet
- Interact with users and gather relevant information using a form
- Customize an Ionic 2 application using the power of SASS variables.
20. 10 Mega Responsive Websites with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
10 projects, 10 websites! This is the summary of this course. It will run you through 10 projects with pure html, CSS, and JavaScript, with which you will master modern techniques and tricks, html5, CSS3, and JavaScript Features and CSS3 Animations, Transforms, and Transitions.
This course will show you how to create modern web design templates. These are what this course will contain:
- 10 Projects with pure HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
- Modern techniques and tricks
- Learn to create modern web design templates
- Modern html5, CSS3, and JavaScript features
- CSS3 Animations, Transforms, and Transitions.
Now that we have reached the end of this blog on the top 20 web development courses, I would like to say au revoir by wishing you the best for all your endeavors concerning web development. I hope this list offers you value and guidance on how to choose the top 20 web development courses, which we hope, will put you on the road to career advancement!