About CS 204

This course is about Front-End Web Development. The "front-end" is jargon for all the stuff that goes on in the browser. (The "back-end" is the term for all the operations on the server, which usually means updating databases to record information that the user has submitted or retrieving information that was previously stored.) The front end includes:

  • structuring the content using HTML
  • styling the content using CSS
  • dynamically updating the page using JavaScript (JS) and jQuery (JQ)

Intended Audience

This course is intended for beginning CS and MAS majors. Its prerequisites are CS 111 or an equivalent "CS 1" course that introduces programming (variables, conditionals, functions, using objects and invoking methods and so on). Knowledge of JavaScript is not required.

Topics

The course is always being updated. The exact topics for the current semester are on the schedule. The following is a list of topics that are usually covered.

  1. Using a Unix development environment, URLs
  2. HTML and CSS
  3. CSS 2: selectors, box model, inheritance, fonts
  4. CSS 3: float layouts, flex layouts
  5. Mobile and responsive, Media Queries
  6. JavaScript introduction
  7. JavaScript dates and objects
  8. The Document Object Model (DOM) & the jQuery library
  9. Event Handlers
  10. Closures and Namespaces
  11. Object-Oriented Programming: Methods and Objects
  12. HTML Forms
  13. Bootstrap and Grid Systems
  14. How JavaScript interacts with forms and the DOM
  15. LocalStorage
  16. Ajax: .get() .post()
  17. Slideshows, Dropdowns, Modals
  18. Object-Oriented Programming: Classes and Inheritance
  19. Keyboard and Mouse event handlers
  20. jQuery UI, date picker, menus, autocomplete
  21. Accessibility