Free web development courses and talks worth your time

Start here if you have never installed a code editor: Getting started, Core and Extension modules take you from beginner to comfortable, not expert. The modules are fully free; the Scrimba partner video course it mentions is optional.

Covers the command line, Git, HTML, CSS Flexbox and JavaScript basics through projects, from a recipes page to a landing page, Rock Paper Scissors, Etch-a-Sketch and a calculator. Finish it before starting Odin's Full Stack JavaScript path.

Short modules on the box model, selectors, nesting, the cascade, specificity and inheritance, each a single article. Use it when CSS behavior surprises you, since the cascade and specificity modules explain how the browser picks a winning rule.

Written-out lecture notes running from HTML and the DOM through forms, CSS, responsive design, Bootstrap and Sass. Choose it if you like a lecture's pacing; the course goes on to Git, Python, Django and JavaScript.

Starts at Intermediate HTML and CSS, so finish Foundations first, even if you came from MDN. From there it runs in fixed order through JavaScript, React, databases, Node with Express and PostgreSQL, and job hunting.

A University of Helsinki course that builds single page applications with React against REST APIs written in Node.js, then adds Redux, MongoDB, GraphQL and TypeScript. Take it once you write JavaScript comfortably; it now runs continuously instead of in yearly versions.

Opens a four-part series on browser internals with CPU and GPU basics, drawn as office workers at desks, then Chrome's multi-process architecture. Read it to understand why performance advice exists before you meet the rendering details.

A Gecko engineer at Mozilla explains why the path from DOM tree through style, box tree, layout and paint is optimized the way it is, so you can write faster apps. The page is undated and reads as older, but the reasoning still applies.

Covers Chromium's pipeline from networking and parsing through Blink rendering, V8, module loading, sandboxing and developer tooling, noting where Firefox and Safari differ. It is long, so use it as a reference after the shorter explainers.

Archibald's JSConf.Asia 2018 talk starts from the bug where things run in the wrong order and works through tasks, microtasks, setTimeout and requestAnimationFrame. Watch it after your first async JavaScript, while the event loop still feels like guesswork.

Talks grouped by year, each with speaker, event and running time, so you can plan your viewing. It ranges from Ryan Dahl's "10 Things I Regret About Node.js" to Sarah Drasner on web animation and Stefan Judis on HTTP headers.

A working developer's notes on four talks, opening with Rich Hickey's "Simple Made Easy", which separates simple (few interwoven pieces) from easy (familiar). Read it for the reasoning behind architecture choices once you are working in React codebases.