Start Here on Your JavaScript Journey

My name is Dan Gilleland. I’ve created this site as a place to put my ad-hoc resources that support my CPSC-1520 classes in January 2025. Why this site instead of the official LMS? Because this is way easier to maintain, and the effort involved in authoring doesn’t need to be hindered by the clunkyness of most LMSes available today.

Contributions

If you have a suggestion or content request, please add them as comments on this discussion.

My goal is to take you on a journey. It is one that will take you (an aspiring web developer) on a guided tour of the fundamentals of JavaScript. It’s not an end-goal in itself. Rather, it’s a starting point. Learning how to program is a lifelong journey, and it can take you to places unexpected. I want to give you a good start.

Read the Roadmap

Discover what you will be learning and where I’m going to take you as you start your journey into JavaScript.

Read the Roadmap

Using this site

Use the side-bar site navigation if you know where you want to go. Some of the links in the navigation jump to the official documentation on the Mozilla Developer Network; these will have the MDN badge next to the link and will open in a new browser tab.

If you are unsure of where to find what you’re looking for, then use the built-in search (Ctrl + k). It’s pretty good, and is part of the Astro Starlight framework this site is built on. Alternatively, check out the first item in each of the following areas:

Your First Tutorial

How-To Guides

Explanations

References

Where is it?

This site is undergoing active changes. If you’ve been directed here by me (Dan) for a very recent update (like, in the last few minutes), and the content I pointed you to doesn’t appear, then force a refresh of your browser by pressing Ctrl + F5

Audience & Content Advisory

On this site you will find tutorials, how-to guides, references, and explanations. I am applying the Diátaxis framework in organizing and authoring the content on this site. You can view the commit history to see what’s new.

Caution

This site is temporary, so don’t expect any bookmarks to work after June 2025. I am, however, planning on taking the work done here and publishing it into a longer-lived site on Programming Fundamentals for JavaScript/TypeScript.

For my students this semester, you can find my teaching schedule online (blank parts of my schedule are taken up with prep, meetings, etc.). I also use an Instructor Workbook for each section to track what we’ve covered and what’s upcoming. Choose the workbook for your section and review the agenda.

Section A01

Your classes are on Tuesday, Wednesday (online), and Friday. As students in the Computer Software Development career path, you have already taken Programming Fundamentals.

Instructor Workbook - A01

Section A02

Your classes are on Monday (online), Thursday, and Friday. As students in the Computer Software Development career path, you have already taken Programming Fundamentals.

Instructor Workbook - A02

Section A05

Your classes are on Monday, Wednesday (online), and Thursday. As students in the Web Design and Development career path, your participation in CPSC-1520 is your opportunity to learn Programming Fundamentals in JavaScript.

Instructor Workbook - A05

Student Workbook and Integrations 💯

If you’re one of my students, then you know that I daily reference Student Workbooks. You can add any of these tutorials to your workbook on your own (though I may give guidance on where to put them for in-class lessons). Here’s how you can do that.

1. First, pick out some tutorial you want to add to your workbook (for example, Querying the DOM).

2. Choose a place in your workbook. For example, create a query-dom folder under the src folder.

   • Directorydocs/

     • …
   • Directorysrc/

     • …
     • Directoryquery-dom/ Sample subfolder for your specific tutorial

       • …
     • …
   • ReadMe.md

3. Follow the tutorial by creating the file(s) and adding the provided assets.