Recently, via Hacker News, I came across this link to Google Code University. The University consists of introductions to a variety of subject matter in software development and Web programming. Some are internal courses that Google uses to train their own engineers and others are from outside sources such as Princeton, Stanford, University of Washington, and many more. They have courses on Programming Languages, Web Programming, Web Security, Algorithms, Android, Distributed Systems, Tools, and Google APIs and Tools.
As I have only minimal HTML and CSS skills and no Javascript skills at all, I decided to try out the HTML, CSS, and Javascript from the Ground Up course. It’s about 2 hours long and is broken up into several videos and exercises. There is a zip file with course material so that you can follow along and work the exercises. As you would expect from a 2 hour course, I’m hardly and expert Web designer after going through the material but I did learn some things I didn’t know before. More importantly, I came away with a refined way of thinking about HTML, CSS, Javascript, and the relationships between them.
The course is perfect for someone like me. I let Org-mode do most of the heavy lifting in generating HTML and only occasionally insert HTML code manually to tweak the result. Some of the tricks I learned from the course will help me do this in a more effective way. The CSS material will help me refine the look of my new Home page once I get around to setting it up.
All in all, the course was enjoyable and well worth my time. I will probably try out some of the other courses too. They have a wide variety and many of them look interesting.