Introduction to programming for the Web

Web pages have become interactive, and many services have become available via the web: we book hotel rooms, we order goods, we collaboratively write papers, we participate in online experiments, we annotate video and audio, we search for data and browse through digital resources… In this one-week introductory course we will explore the fascinating world of client-side web programming using JavaScript. We will cover basic form input validation, data structures, and the MVC programming paradigm for graphical user interfaces – in a hands-on practical way. At the end of the course you will have a fully functional application that will create a word frequency list from a text input. All you need to participate is (1) a computer with a modern browser (e.g. Firefox, Google Chrome, Edge, Safari), and a text editor (2) some programming experience (in any programming language). On the first day I will give an introduction to HTML and JavaScript, and will show you some hidden features of your browser. Then I will describe the structure of JavaScript programs and show how to build data structures that capture the data we are interested in. I will develop functions to process data and to interact with the user via a graphical interface. Finally, I will integrate everything into a useful application that runs inside a web page in your browser.