Overview of interactive web programming exercises

One of the issues novice web engineers face is the deluge of materials that are out there on the web. It is easy to be overwhelmed, not just by the sheer amount of materials, but also the fast pace of new standards, new frameworks and new languages. In this course, we only have a few weeks to teach you the basics of web programming. For this reason, below we have listed a number of interactive exercises from a single source: nodeschool.io. These exercise bundles are themselves implemented as Node.js packages! So, you will use node to learn node!

Nodeschool offers a long list of self-guided tutorials and exercises; we have matched them up to our lectures. A ★ indicates that this concept is taught in class, a ☆ indicates that this is useful knowledge but not required. If a row has no mark at all, then this exercise can safely be skipped.

A nice side effect of the nodeschool.io exercises is the fact that they all require you to use the terminal - in itself a useful exercise.

These are largely introductory exercises, each one takes no longer than a few minutes to read up upon and solve. They will help you to get started if you have never programmed in JavaScript and/or Node.js before this course. They do not only introduce language features, but also how to use the node package manger npm and how to debug Node.js programs.

Note: This is completely optional! We do not require you to go through these exercises.

Where to start

1. Make sure to have node and npm installed.
2. Access the GitHub repositories linked in the table.
3. Install each package as described in the GitHub README, e.g. npm install --global javascripting or npm install learnyounode. In the latter case (no --global option) the package will be installed in the current directory under node_modules. If you can choose, stick to the global installation of the package as described in the READMEs, as then you can directly follow the instructions in the respective repository and simply start the workshop with the command javascripting or learnyounode. If you cannot for some reason globally install the packages, your command will look something like this node node_modules/javascripting/bin/javascripting.
4. Run through the workshop exercises!