Before Starting Full Stack Development

To take better advantage of the upcoming course, we encourage you to finish and review any content from the Prework.

The upcoming material assumes that you have a good level of understanding of the following topics:

Things you should know about HTML/CSS

• What is HTML, and what is it used for?
• The most essential tags like headings (<h1>, <h2>, <h3>...), paragraphs (<p>), ordered/unordered lists (<ol>, <ul>), etc. Think about how each of these tags changes the look, feel and the behavior of your website. For example, what looks bigger, <h1> or <h2>? Why use <ul> instead of <ol>? Etc.
• How to include a separate CSS stylesheet into your website by using the <link> tag.
• How to override or enhance the way that HTML tags look and behave by using CSS selectors and rules, for example:
  • How can I select an element to update its styles? By using a selector.
  • The most simple things like changing text color and manipulating fonts (size, family, etc).
  • Changing the element's background color or image.
• Fully comprehend the <div> tag that inherently behaves as a "box" (which means that it has borders, width and height) and how to use <div> to separate your content visually.
• How to create the most common website layouts using the display: flex; CSS rule.
  • How can you make a <div> be on the side of another? By applying display: flex; to a common immediate parent.
  • How can you make a sidebar layout?
  • How can you make the classic "Instagram timeline" layout?

Things you should know about CSS

• What is CSS, and what is it used for? Thanks to CSS, we can select specific elements in the HTML and style them with colors, sizes, etc.
• Why is the use of the #id selector discouraged? Because it's too specific, it goes against reusability.
• When should I use the #id selector? Never, we will use #ids only when coding in JavaScript.
• Why are stylesheets supposed to be written from the most generic to the most specific styles? Because you will write way fewer lines of code that way, you also avoid lots of bugs or conflicts between your selectors.

Things you should know about programming

• What is "the console" or "terminal"? For a web developer, it's usually the place to get information about your code; it allows you to "print" and show the content of variables so that you can debug your code. Developers use the console all day, all the time.
• How can I print something in the developer inspector (a.k.a, the console)? By typing console.log();
• How can I print the value of a variable? console.log(yourVariableName);
• What is a variable and how to store values in it? let age = 2;
• What can I store in a variable? A boolean, string, number, array (or list), null, object, undefined, and function.
• What is a logical operation? It's a way to ask questions with code, and these operations will always return boolean answers. For example, if you have a variable age and want to know if it's bigger than 16: (age > 16). This logical operation will be converted to true.

1(age > 16) == true

• What is a condition? A condition uses logical operations to block or skip lines of code. if(age>16) console.log("You can drive").
• How can I save multiple values in a variable? Use an array or object. For example: let ages = [2,23,45,67].
• How can I loop an array? The most common way is using the for loop like this: for(let i=0; i<ages.length; i++) console.log("Age: "+i);. This code will print in the developer inspector all the ages inside the ages array.

Things you should know about JavaScript

• JavaScript is "event-oriented", which means your code will execute based on some user or browser event, for example: When the user clicks, when the website loads, when the user scrolls, when the website reloads, etc.
• JavaScript can create HTML and CSS the same way you do: You can tell JS to write any HTML you want. Basically, the code can "write itself" if you create a smart enough website.
• JavaScript code must always go in JavaScript files that end with .js. Other ways are discouraged 99% of the time.
• You can import JS using the <script> tag.

Welcome to web development

That is it! You are good to go if you know 70% of these bullets. If not, we encourage you to dig for more information about each of these topics, read our lessons, practice some exercises again, and -maybe- even ask Google or one of our mentors for great resources to learn more about it.