2018 marked the beginning of Scrimba.com as a course platform. Throughout the year we launched a total of 16 free courses. And luckily for us, they’ve seemed to strike a chord within the dev community, as we’re now getting over 100K monthly visitors to the site.
As the year is coming to an end, I’d like to give you a challenge. A new year is a great opportunity to devote some time to improve your skills. So I’d like you to learn a new technology during the first weeks of 2019.
I challenge you to pick a course below and make it a new year’s resolution to complete it in January!
Whether you want to learn a whole new front-end framework (e.g. React, Vue, Angular), brush up your CSS skills (e.g. Variables or Flexbox), or simply get an introduction to neural networks, we’ve got you covered.
If you’re truly serious, tweet out which course you plan to go through as well!
Here’s what you’ve got to choose from:
Learn CSS Flexbox
This was the second Scrimba course we created. The first one was about CSS Grid and became a huge success, so we wanted to follow up with one on Flexbox, as the two technologies complement each other well. In it, I teach you the most important things you need to know about Flexbox.
Learn CSS Variables
CSS Custom Properties (aka Variables) is a huge win for front-end developers. It brings the power of variables to CSS, which results in less repetition, better readability, and more flexibility. Plus, unlike variables from CSS preprocessors, they are actually a part of the DOM, which has a lot of benefits.
The course contains eight interactive screencasts. They are all short and to the point. At the end of most of them, the instructor (yours truly) asks you to solve a challenge, directly in the screencast window. This is a great way of making sure the knowledge sticks, and you’ll get to check if your solution matches the instructor’s (mine).
Learn Bootstrap 4
Bootstrap has long been the most popular component library on the web, and version 4 represents a major rewrite of the library. Not only are there a lot of changes under the hood, but there are also several new concepts you’ll need to wrap your head around.
The course takes you through everything you need to know in order to create full-blown websites with Bootstrap 4. Whether you’ve been working with Bootstrap before, or are completely new to the framework, this course will get you up to speed with the newest version.
Introduction to HTML5
HTML is one of the core building blocks on the web, as it’s what holds the content on all the websites you visit. Thus, HTML is a must-have skill for all web developers.
While HTML is a big subject, the basics can be learned quickly. This course aims at taking you from absolute beginner to proficient in HTML in less than an hour. Throughout the lectures, you’ll be building a neat-looking website from scratch together with the brilliant instructor Eric Tirado.
Learn D3.js
D3.js is the most popular data visualization library for the web. It allows you to make sense of your data through a powerful API of methods.
Throughout the course, you’ll learn the most important features of the library while building four different visualizations. You’ll be able to play around with the code whenever you want so that you can be sure that you’ll understand how it works.
How to build a beautiful blog
If you’ve ever been curious to learn HTML and CSS but found yourself frustrated along the way, this course is for you.
In it, our instructor Zaydek will provide you with a series of steps and perspectives along the way to help you build your own website without getting lost. He teaches you how to start from scratch and architect something that would then be meaningful for you and others.
Introduction to JavaScript
This course teaches you the basics of JavaScript, the most popular programming language on the web. JavaScript can be used to create websites, games, servers and native apps! It’s a highly valuable skill to learn, and this course will give you the kick-start you need to get going. The instructor Dylan Israel runs the very popular YouTube channel, Coding Tutorials 360, so you can be assured that you’re in good hands.
The course contains 14 lessons and 7 challenges. In the challenges, you’ll be encouraged to jump into the code and get your hands dirty. This is both fun and great for making the knowledge stick.
Introduction to ES6+
This course will teach you the most modern features of JavaScript, also known as ES6+. JavaScript is one of the most popular programming languages in the world. It’s used almost everywhere: from large-scale web applications to complex servers to mobile and IoT devices.
As with Introduction to JavaScript, this course is taught by the awesome Dylan Israel of the YouTube channel Coding Tutorials 360.
Introduction to CSS
CSS is what makes websites look beautiful, so it’s a must-have skill for any web designer or developer. This course will teach you the basics of it in less than an hour. So sit back and enjoy brilliant Scrimba-instructor Eric Tirado’s fun and engaging explanations! Towards the end of the course, you’ll also be given a challenge, in order to make sure you’ve understood the concepts.
Before enrolling in the course, you should have basic knowledge of how HTML works. If you don’t have that, we’d recommend you to take Eric’s Introduction to HTML course first.
Learn Bulma CSS
Bulma is the brainchild of CSS Guru Jeremy Thomas @jgthms. It’s a modern CSS framework based on Flexbox. The framework makes scaffolding and designing websites a breeze with best-in-class documentation and well-designed, intuitive components and modifiers. ✨
Bulma is great not just for building but learning best HTML and CSS practices, too! It’s like having @jgthms there the whole time.
In this course, you’ll learn to create not one, not two, but three beautiful, responsive websites bootstrapped with Bulma in less than an hour. The course is taught by our eminent instructor Zaydek.
Build a chat app with React and Chatkit
Chat is eating the world and React is eating front-end development, so why not learn React through building a chat app?
That’s exactly what this course will enable you to do: at the end of it, you’ll both have a solid understanding of React.js and your very own personalized chat application. The chat will be built using the Chatkit API, meaning you don’t have worry about doing any back-end coding.
The course contains 19 screencasts in total. Several of these include challenges where you’ll be encouraged to jump into the code and change it. Taught by yours truly.
Introduction to TypeScript
TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript, aimed at making the language more scalable and reliable. This course will teach you everything you need to know in order to get started with TypeScript. It contains 22 interactive screencasts, and in several of them, you’ll be challenged to solve interactive tasks, so that we’re sure you’ve understood the concepts.
It’s important that you have a basic understanding of JavaScript before taking this course. If you need a refresher, please check out our Introduction to JavaScript course here.
Learn Vue.js
Vue is a newer and refreshing framework for building web apps with at least an order of magnitude more ease than writing vanilla HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Vue frees your data from the DOM, and provides an idiomatic guide to programming JavaScript, making development much faster and more fun.
The library is great for composing both static websites and dynamic web apps, and so learning it is central to building modern products and services.
This course covers the minimum JavaScript needed to get started with Vue, the basics of Vue, and two more advanced examples that build on the ideas discussed and focus on fixing some aspect of the existing codebase. Through nine interactive screencasts, it aims to both help and to inspire you.
Build your first Angular app
By learning Angular you’ll greatly increase your chances of getting a job as a front-end developer! So in this course, the well-known Angular expert Dan Wahlin will teach you the framework by building a real-world application.
The course is split into several sections. In the introduction, you’ll learn about the app you’ll be building and the concepts you’ll learn. Next up, you’ll learn about components and modules, before we continue on with data binding. Then you’ll learn about services and http and finally routing.
Throughout the course, you’ll be building an app which displays customer orders. Wahlin has chosen this project carefully, as it’ll teach you all the core concepts behind Angular. So be prepared for 36 value-packed screencasts.
Needless to say, we’re super-stoked at Scrimba to have Dan Wahlin as a teacher on the platform.
Learn React
In this course, you’ll learn all the basics to build dynamic, interactive web applications with React. React is a library created by the developers at Facebook which excels in creating very fast web applications using web components built with a simple-to-understand API.
Upon completion of this course, you’ll know everything you need in order to build web applications in React. It covers JSX, props and state, conditional rendering, styling components, lifecycle methods, fetching data from an API, handling events, forms & controlled components, writing modern React code, and setting up an environment outside of Scrimba.
It’s our longest course on Scrimba, with 48 value-packed lectures. So taking this course is actually be a huge step towards becoming a React developer.
Also, the instructor Bob Ziroll is the Head of Education at V School, and he’s extremely good at explaining complex code in a simple manner.
Neural networks in JavaScript
This is the last course of 2018, but the very first one about machine learning, so we’re super-excited to share it with you.
Neural Networks in JavaScript gives you a practical introduction to Brain.js, a popular library for building neural networks in the browser and in Node.js. Luckily for us, we’ve got the main contributor of Brain.js to create the course, Robert Plummer.
The lectures do not dwell on much theory, but rather on how to code the networks, as Robert is passionate about enabling more developers to use machine learning to solve problems. He explains complex subjects in a simple-to-understand manner, which means the course is suitable for anybody who knows JavaScript.
And that was it for 2018! But don’t worry, we have many more in production which will be launched throughout 2019.
Thanks for reading! My name is Per Borgen, I'm the co-founder of Scrimba – the easiest way to learn to code. You should check out our responsive web design bootcamp if want to learn to build modern website on a professional level.
