I completed the first course of my java programming and software engineering fundamentals specialization yesterday and this is a post to tell you its objectives and if it's a good fit for you too!
Motivation for taking this course
I’m a second-year engineering student from a tier 3 college in India and I’ve just finished my semester end exams. We got 4 weeks off from college and I had been watching all kinds of youtube videos on how to get myself ready for placements. I decided to work on my basic programming skills so I would have a solid foundation for acquiring new skills later.
Objective
The first course offered under this specialization was ‘Programming foundations with HTML, CSS and JavaScript’ by Duke University. There were four different instructors from Duke University for this course. The course objective was to teach us foundational programming concepts in HTML, CSS and JavaScript like branching and looping and methods which would aid us in Problem Solving.
Week 1
Week 1 was an introduction to the course as well as an explanation of how to design a basic web page using HTML. We used codepen.io for this. They also provide us with the duke learning database which makes it very easy for beginners like me to look for in-built functions in HTML and what they do. I also got to do a practice exercise with what I had learnt which further solidified the information in my brain.
Week 2
Week 2 went more into detail about HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I learnt the use of loops and if-else for problem-solving. They taught us functions as well as their return types and function calls. They taught us how to query a pixel in an image and build up to solving the green screen problem( which is to replace the green screen in the background with another image using code). They provided their own environment for coding and it was quite easy to use and easy to read.
Week 3
The purpose of week 3 was to introduce us to the concept of buttons in web pages. I learnt how to change their colours and text. I also learned how to add functionality to it in HTML and write the corresponding code in JavaScript on codepen. I also learnt about canvas in HTML. They gave a lot of examples and exercises which I found very helpful.
Week 4
So week 4 was the final week and it was about image filters on the web. They gave us real-life problems to solve as three fun projects and quizzed us about them.
Conclusion
All in all, I was able to add HTML, CSS and javascript to my resume as skills I know thanks to this course. It is fairly basic and people with no prior knowledge of programming or web designing will find it pretty useful. I hope this helped anyone who’s looking to learn these things and try them out.
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