Hi, welcome. I'm Mike McNeil and this is building apps with JavaScript.
A course where we'll cover a few things starting with the basics of practical app development
and going into using some of the latest technologies available in ES8 and Node.js,
called async/await,
and then finally we'll wrap up by building a complete application
involving user authentication, password recovery,
enrollment and billing.
I created Sails, a web framework for Node.js, an API framework, in 2012,
I guess now five years ago,
and originally I got into Node.js to build real-time features, like chat,
and realized that I could kind of use it for everything and that was really exciting.
And a few years later, and now the founder of the Sails company,
we build apps and websites for Fortune 500 companies, startups and small to medium sized businesses.
So, to give you a little bit more information about the course, I'll start with my approach in general.
I'm not a teacher, see, I'm a more of a shower.
And when I teach people most of the time, it's usually in the capacity as how can we work best together on a team.
Either cause I'm hiring them as an employee
or partnering up with them as part of a customers team.
So the way that I approach a lot of this stuff is pretty opinionated
and you may find that throughout some of the course it'll get too opinionated for you
and if that happens that's okay and just skip that part.
Goals of the course are to... not to focus on new technology, that we will cover a lot of that,
but to focus on building practical apps with JavaScript, top to bottom.
And that means apps that you can actually build in a reasonable amount of time
and that will work, most of the time at least, for what you need them to do.
And provide a user experience that your customers or your users...
so they'll actually wanna come back to the app and use it again.
So there are a few prerequisites for the course:
One: you're gonna need some basic understanding of programming fundamentals.
So stuff like if statements, for loops, JavaScript functions.
You'll need some HTML, CSS and JavaScript experience.
Now, you don't have to be an expert on Flexbox,
you don't have to be an expert JavaScript developer,
but you need to have built some kind of website before.
And then, last but not least, you need to have some basic familiarity with using GitHub and NPM.
Again, you don't have to be a master of either of those tools
and you certainly don't even need to know how to use Git from the command line,
but you should be able to clone a repo and push and pull.
So that's what you're going to learn in this course.
In the next video I'll go over the technologies that we're going to use to do all that
and why are we using them.