Becoming a Programmer from Scratch

We're going to dig into the language of the World Wide Web - HTML. We'll talk about where it came from, how to use it, and perform some basic work with it.

What is the Web, but links and images? We'll dig into the meat and potatoes of what you see on web pages, how they work and how to use them.

All these links go somewhere - but how? We're going to take a lesson and do a deep dive on URLs so that we know what we're doing when we work with them.

Even long-time users of Git end up with junk files in Git because of a bad gitignore file. We'll look at how to get junk out and keep the problem from happening again.

Another mistake even long-time users make in Git is forgetting to branch, and doing a bunch of work on the main branch that should have been isolated. Never fear - Git knows how to do this really well, and we'll make it happen in this lesson.

CSS, or Cascading Stylesheets, is how content on the web is made to look beautiful, or least effective. We'll dig into the basics of CSS and see how to make our content more visually effective.

The most basic elements you'll work with in HTML are DIVs and SPANs, the workhorses of HTML. We'll dive into how they're used and what the difference between them is.

We're going to deepen our understanding of what is actually going on when we click links. We'll examine HTTP, the protocol that browsers and applications use to transfer content on the Internet, and what it means for our work.

Razor Pages is Microsoft's solution for writing code inside web pages. We'll look at the basic syntax, and look at how to solve our problems using Razor.

We'll look at some basic login forms and how to make them user-friendly and accessible.

We'll take the work we did in creating our form in Razor page to the next level.

Testing stuff manually is a huge drag - we're going to look at how to create automated tests that do the work for us every time. With this done, we can make sure that changes we make won't break older stuff that we wrote - as long as its covered by a test.

We're going to look at an organic and interactive way to learn CSS. Engaging with the sites you use and seeing how they work with respect to their styling and interactivity beats the heck out of poring over web pages, or, for that matter, watching courses online.

Once you get past the basics, you're going to want to automate stuff you do in Git. We'll look at a quick and easy way to automate some multi-step Git processes.

We'll look at how to create an effective user interface by mapping input to output.

Mobile interfaces are at least half of the user-ship nowadays - we'll look at leveraging Bootstrap, the HTML framework we're working with, and how to make our stuff look good on a mobile device.

Another overlooked client for our work is a printer - we'll look at how to use stylesheets to make our website look good when its printed out.

With our page looking good on mobile and print, we'll implement the actual production code for our menu page.

As we begin the flight path towards delivering a real application, we're going to take everything we've done so far and get it into a real Razor pages implementation.

Installing SQL Server is a huge pain - we're going to look at using another tool, Docker, to run a local container with SQL Server instead of installing it to our machine.

Databases, how do they work? We're going to look at the basics of designing a database to contain our product data, and what the rules are for how we do it.

Writing database code is a huge pain - but we can let a piece of software called an ORM do it for us. We'll take a look at Microsoft's tool Entity Framework, and how to get it done.

Programming culture is filled with inside jokes, pranks and phrases that seem impenetrable to outsiders. In a rest lesson, we'll take a look at a few key elements and where they come from.

We're going to talk about how I got started in programming. I was very lucky, but I did some things right, and I want to share those with you so that you can turbo-charge your professional development as a programmer,.

Managing software dependencies is a part of any kind of software lifecycle. We're going to look at Nuget, a package manager, and how it manages these dependencies effectively.

All this stuff needs to be versioned so that we can keep track of how things are changing over time. We'll look at Semantic Versioning, the most widely user versioning system in the world.

In order to work effectively in different environments, our application is going to need to have different states of configuration. We'll look at how to manage configuration effectively between local and deployed instances.

At last - our application is ready for at least an internal deployment. We're going to learn how to set up our application so that it can be hosted in Microsoft Azure, Microsoft's cloud hosting service.

As we close out the course, we'll take the last steps to get our application into the wild and hosted out in the world.