The Only Practice-oriented MOOC You Need to Become a Full-Stack Developer From Zero
Learn React, Redux, Node.js, MongoDB, GraphQL and TypeScript in one go!
Table of contents
Fancy CSS techniques are excellent, but have you ever tried launching your dynamic website from scratch, transforming brilliant ideas into a practical reality that is accessible all over the world? Well, that's the most exciting part of a full-stack developer journey. And, you only need this one MOOC to start.
Introducing fullstackopen
Fullstackopen provides a free MOOC-based learning environment. Since The University of Helsinki published such a project in 2019, over 10,000 students have completed one or several courses and landed jobs in tech. According to this project's home page, it aims to
... serve as an introduction to modern web application development with JavaScript. The main focus is on building single page applications with ReactJS that use REST APIs built with Node.js. The course also contains a section on GraphQL, a modern alternative to REST APIs.
This course contains 14 parts, generally covering all the fundamental knowledge you need to know as a full-stack developer. Since each part is independent, you can dive into any individual course according to your interests. Here is each chapter's theme:
- Fundamentals of Web apps
- Introduction to React
- Communicating with server
- Programming a server with NodeJS and Express
- Testing Express servers, user administration
- Testing React apps
- State management with Redux
- React router, custom hooks, styling app with CSS and webpack
- GraphQL
- TypeScript
- React Native
- CI/CD
- Containers
- Using relational databases
Furthermore, you can easily reach many extended readings via external links to deepen your understanding and trust me, you will bookmark most of those valuable sites.
When I started this course, I barely had little knowledge about websites, not to mention Javascript. However, after nine months' effort, I deployed serval sites using React, Node.js, Typescript, GraphQL and MongoDB with ease when I finished the first ten courses. So I believe this course works for everyone, whatever their background. 😉
You can find more information about this series of courses here.
Beginner-friendly
This set of courses also has a nice learning curve, thanks to the down-to-earth materials. The whole courses are practice-oriented, meaning you gain insights into hands-on exercises. You are expected to complete a well-designed small task in each sub-part, and all those tiny parts constitute a fantastic feature in the end. In other words, you grow with your codes.
If you are stuck, the community is here to help, assistance and feedback can be found in telegram and discord, and you can improve yourself by helping others. (The Feynman technique works, right?)
Production-ready
Although these courses are for total beginners, they do a great job clarifying any misunderstanding of critical concepts and underscoring the best practices in the production environment, which allows you to not only successfully deploy the web application but also in an elegant way.
Plus, new courses are added frequently to cover trending technologies in the ever-changing world of web development, so you can access the most practical knowledge whenever you are ready to start your full-stack developer journey.
Conclusion
You can find anything you need in fullstackopen to become a full-stack developer, which would add shiny new tools (React, Redux, Node.js, MongoDB, Typescript, GraphQL and Docker) to your technology stack.
Cheers.