It’s a great time to get into web development. The median annual wage for web developers was $69,430 in May 2018, and employment is projected to increase by 15 percent from 2016 to 2026, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. And while the idea of trying to jump into this field without a background in computer science can be intimidating, in reality it has never been easier to learn programming. There are a plethora of online classes that make it possible to learn to program on your own time. 

If you’ve decided you want to make the leap and learn to code, JavaScript is a great language to start with. JavaScript is the most commonly used programming language among developers. According to an annual survey by Stack Overflow, 69.8% of developers use the language in their work. It is effectively the language of the web. Most browsers and websites are built in part using JavaScript, and front-end developers and designers use it on a daily basis. It is also used in some of the most popular frameworks, libraries and tools, such as Node.js and React. 

We at TUN have put together a list of our favorite free and affordable online courses on JavaScript, so you can choose the courses that will help you learn and ultimately master JavaScript, whether or not you have a programming background.

Beginner Courses on JavaScript

Programming Foundations with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS

This course, offered by Duke University via Coursera, is designed to teach students not only JavaScript, but its sister languages HTML and CSS. These three languages are the foundations of all front-end development. When making a web page, HTML codes the text and images, CSS is used to stylize the HTML elements, and JavaScript makes the page dynamic and interactive. This course is oriented around learning each of these components from the ground up. By the end of the course, you will have a strong understanding of the foundations of web development. You will also be able to build an interactive web page where visitors can upload images and apply image filters.

• College credits: NO — Course Certificate only
• Price: FREE to audit, but there’s a fee to earn and buy a Course Certificate
• Financial aid or scholarship: YES
• Mobile learning: YES
• Self-paced learning: YES
• Flexible deadlines: YES
• Time needed for completion: Approximately 22 hours 
• Languages: English with subtitles in English
• Vendor: Coursera

Note: Prices for all courses listed in this article are true on the date of publishing, but are subject to change.

2. The Complete JavaScript Course 2019: Build Real Projects!

This is a comprehensive course designed to not only introduce students to JavaScript but help them put JavaScript into practice and understand how the programming language works. The course begins by covering the basics of the language, with a brief crash course on HTML and CSS, before moving into more advanced concepts like objects and functions. Instructor Jonas Schmedtmann also includes a section on how JavaScript works behind the scenes, designed to help students with no background in computer science develop a deeper grasp of the fundamentals of programming. Furthermore, the course includes lessons on popular libraries and frameworks, including React, Angular, and Node.js. Finally, you’ll have the opportunity to test your knowledge with a handful of hands-on projects designed to help students develop a practical skillbase.

• College credits: NO — Certificate of Completion only
• Price: $50 on sale (199.99 regular price)
• Financial aid or scholarships: NO
• Mobile learning: YES
• Self-paced learning: YES
• Flexible deadlines: YES
• Time needed for completion: 28 hours
• Languages: English with subtitles in English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish
• Vendor: Udemy

3. Modern JavaScript (from Novice to Ninja)

This comprehensive, 19-hour course begins with introductory concepts, like the fundamentals of object-oriented programming and working with prototypes and classes, and by the end, covers some more advanced concepts. As you go along, you’ll steadily progress from the basics of the language to using it to create a variety of real-world front-end applications, such as quizzes, weather apps, and even chat rooms. Instructor Shaun Pelling touches on some advanced concepts as well — you’ll learn about objects, prototypes and prototypal inheritance, and more. By the end, you’ll be working with a variety of tools, libraries, databases, and frameworks, including Babel, Node.js, Firebase, and more. 

• College credits: NO — Certificate of Completion only
• Price: $25 on sale ($99.99 regular price)
• Financial aid or scholarships: NO
• Mobile learning: YES
• Self-paced learning: YES
• Flexible deadlines: YES
• Time needed for completion: 19 hours
• Languages: English with subtitles in English
• Vendor: Udemy

4. Modern JavaScript From The Beginning

A comprehensive and challenging course, “Modern JavaScript From The Beginning” is great for people who are new to JavaScript but have programming experience. It covers all you need to learn about JavaScript before you learn a framework. Instructor Brad Traversy begins by explaining the fundamentals — data types, arrays, functions, loops, etc. — but quickly ramps up the complexity. You’ll learn about the DOM, manipulating interfaces, events, asynchronous JavaScript with AJAX and Fetch, and more.

• College credits: NO — Certificate of Completion only
• Price: $43.75 on sale ($174.99 regular price)
• Financial aid or scholarships: NO
• Mobile learning: YES
• Self-paced learning: YES
• Flexible deadlines: YES
• Time needed for completion: 21 hours, 30 minutes
• Languages: English with subtitles in English, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish
• Vendor: Udemy

5.JavaScript Introduction

This course, produced by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and available via edX, is a very strong introduction to JavaScript as well as HTML and CSS. You will learn the fundamentals of JavaScript and practical tools for using it in real life. The course is also built around a series of projects, beginning with a HTML/CSS/JS web page and ending with a small application. You’ll learn how to incorporate JavaScript code into a website, build interactive websites using the DOM API, build basic graphics and animations, and more.

• College credits: NO — Verified Certificate only
• Price: FREE to audit, but there’s a $99 fee to earn and buy a Verified Certificate
• Financial aid or scholarships: YES
• Mobile learning: YES
• Self-paced learning: YES
• Flexible deadlines: YES
• Time needed for completion: 5 weeks (6–8 hours per week)
• Languages: English with subtitles in English
• Vendor: edX

6. Practical JavaScript

This course from Watch and Code is ideal for new programmers who are interested in learning JavaScript for web development. The course is designed to give students a strong foundation in JavaScript concepts that they will actually use in real life. Instructor Gordon Zhu begins with a deep dive into the fundamentals of programming — concepts like functions, objects, and conditional logic. If you’re new to programming, this will provide you with a solid foundation to learn other programming languages easily. 

• College credits: NO
• Price: FREE
• Financial aid or scholarships: NO
• Mobile learning: NO
• Self-paced learning: YES
• Flexible deadlines: YES
• Time needed for completion: Approximately 8 hours, 30 minutes
• Languages: English 
• Vendor: Watch and Code

Intermediate Courses On JavaScript

7. The JavaScript Toolkit: Write Cleaner, Faster & Better Code

This original course from Skillshare is taught by Christian Heilmann, a senior developer at Microsoft and the author of several books on JavaScript. The course is less a traditional JavaScript course than a guide to learning JavaScript effectively. It is designed for developers of all levels, whether you are just getting started with JavaScript or if you have some experience but want to dive deeper and want to learn to clean up your code and expand your connections to the JavaScript community. Heilmann will provide you with essential techniques so you’ll be able to organize your development environment well and stay up to date with the JavaScript community. We recommend this course primarily for intermediate students who are already familiar with the syntax and the fundamentals of JavaScript, and are interested in cleaning up their code, reducing their mistakes, and learning the best strategies for working with JavaScript.

• College credits: NO
• Price: One-month free trial for new members and then $15 for monthly Premium OR $99 for annual Premium (billed annually) or $8.25 per month (billed monthly)
• Financial aid or scholarships: YES
• Mobile learning: YES
• Self-paced learning: YES
• Flexible deadlines: YES
• Time needed for completion: 1 hour, 15 minutes
• Languages: English
• Vendor: Skillshare

8. So you think you know JavaScript?

If you’ve taken a few courses on JavaScript and feel that you keep running into the same concepts, this is the course for you. “So you think you know JavaScript” is based around a few aspects of the JavaScript language that often get overlooked in beginner-level courses — scopes, “this”, and prototypes. These three concepts are fundamental to a deep understanding of JavaScript and often trip up programmers who don’t fully understand them. By the end of the course, you’ll be able to use closures and callbacks, create prototype inheritance chains, understand JavaScript variable scoping, and work with the “this” keyword effectively.

• College credits: NO — Certificate of Completion only
• Price: $12.50 on sale (49.99 regular price)
• Financial aid or scholarships: NO
• Mobile learning: YES
• Self-paced learning: YES
• Flexible deadlines: YES
• Time needed for completion: 6 hours
• Languages: English with subtitles in English
• Vendor: Udemy

9. JavaScript Objects and Prototypes

This Pluralsight course is dedicated to teaching object properties and prototypes. By the end of the course, you will know about the various ways to create objects in JavaScript as well as how to recognize and utilize prototypal inheritance. Instructor Jim Cooper dives deep into these concepts and what is going on behind the scenes. In the first module, you’ll learn how to work with property attributes and use getters and setters. The second module is dedicated to prototypes and inheritance. You’ll learn not only what prototypes are, but how they work. Ultimately, you’ll be able to write simpler, but more powerful JavaScript.

• College credits: NO — Certificate Only
• Price: 10-day free trial and then $35 billed monthly or $299 billed annually for Personal plan; $449 billed annually for Premium plan
• Financial aid or scholarships: NO
• Mobile learning: YES
• Self-paced learning: YES
• Flexible deadlines: YES
• Time needed for completion: 48 minutes
• Languages: English
• Vendor: Pluralsight

10. Practical Design Patterns in JavaScript

This course from instructor Jonathan Mills is oriented around helping developers who are already familiar with JavaScript improve their code by implementing practical, object-oriented design patterns. Design patterns are reusable solutions for regular problems that occur in JavaScript. Think of them as grammar rules — by implementing and following them, your code becomes more structured and, ultimately, readable to experienced developers familiar with the design patterns you use. In short, your code will be cleaner, more easily interpretable, and therefore more maintainable. If you’ve already got a firm grasp on JavaScript and would like to take your ability to the next level, this is a great course for you.

• College credits: NO — Certificate Only
• Price: 10-day free trial and then $35 billed monthly or $299 billed annually for Personal plan; $449 billed annually for Premium plan
• Financial aid or scholarships: NO
• Mobile learning: YES
• Self-paced learning: YES
• Flexible deadlines: YES
• Time needed for completion: 3 hours, 10 minutes
• Languages: English
• Vendor: Pluralsight

11. JavaScript Best Practices

“JavaScript Best Practices” covers the topics that JavaScript programmers run into the most problems with. You’ll learn about common syntax problems and about how to structure your code to avoid these issues. You’ll also learn about callbacks, promises, and how to problem solve when you run into errors with them. The course also covers using Node.js and common issues that arise when using cross-platform runtime environments.

• College credits: NO — Certificate Only
• Price: 10-day free trial and then $35 billed monthly or $299 billed annually for Personal plan; $449 billed annually for Premium plan
• Financial aid or scholarships: NO
• Mobile learning: YES
• Self-paced learning: YES
• Flexible deadlines: YES
• Time needed for completion: 2 hours, 39 minutes
• Languages: English
• Vendor: Pluralsight

Advanced Courses on JavaScript

12. JavaScript: Understanding the Weird Parts

This course is designed to fill in all the gaps in your knowledge about JavaScript. If you’ve taken a number of courses and still don’t feel fluent, this course will help you understand the core concepts behind JavaScript. By the end, you’ll feel more comfortable debugging and solving problems in JavaScript, reading source code in popular JavaScript frameworks, and even building a JavaScript library or framework. The course covers topics such as object-oriented JavaScript and prototypal inheritance, closures, Immediately Invoked Function Expressions (IIFEs), and more.

• College credits: NO — Certificate of Completion only
• Price: $43.75 on sale ($174.99 regular price)
• Financial aid or scholarships: NO
• Mobile learning: YES
• Self-paced learning: YES
• Flexible deadlines: YES
• Time needed for completion: 11 hours, 30 minutes
• Languages: English with subtitles in English, Indonesian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, and Thai
• Vendor: Udemy

13. Advanced JavaScript Concepts

This course is a very deep dive into advanced JavaScript concepts. The nearly 24-hour course begins with two sections on the foundations of JavaScript, including lectures on the JavaScript engine and how it works. As the course goes on, you’ll cover common advanced-level concepts, such as closures and prototypes, as well as sections on asynchronous JavaScript, error handling, data structures in JavaScript, and much more. This is a great course if you’re looking for thorough lessons that will not only teach you both the core concepts in JavaScript and  complex, advanced concepts.

• College credits: NO — Certificate of Completion only
• Price: $50 on sale (199.99 regular price)
• Financial aid or scholarships: NO
• Mobile learning: YES
• Self-paced learning: YES
• Flexible deadlines: YES
• Time needed for completion: 23 hours, 30 minutes
• Languages: English with subtitles in English
• Vendor: Udemy

For more online courses, check TUN’s list of curated classes, or use the online classes search engine to find the best online courses in any subject.