OpenJS Foundation
Express.js Official Getting Started Guide
Express's four-page starter guide — install, Hello World, generator, routing and static files, now covering Express 5 and TypeScript setup.
Beginner0–2 hours
Learn Web Development with the Web Development tutorials and online courses.
Nothing else on this site has as many entry points as web development, and nothing else confuses beginners as reliably. HTML, then CSS, then JavaScript, then a framework, then a server, then a database — and every roadmap you find online adds three more boxes to that list. The eighteen tutorials collected here are the ones we'd actually hand someone, in an order that doesn't waste their first month.
Worth knowing early: the browser side and the server side are different jobs that happen to share a language. You can build a career on either. Most people start in the browser because you see results in seconds, and that feedback loop is what keeps beginners going.
Structure and layout first. Responsive Web Design — freeCodeCamp is the rebuilt 2022 certification: twenty projects covering semantic HTML, forms, accessibility, Flexbox and Grid, each with a test suite you have to pass. Then JavaScript — The Modern JavaScript Tutorial for depth, or MDN: Dynamic Scripting with JavaScript if you want something gentler, with Test-your-skills checks after each topic. Then React, where Learn React — Scrimba earns its place: around eleven hours and 170-plus coding challenges edited live in the browser. If you'd rather have one path covering all three, The Odin Project: Foundations does it on your own machine with Git from day one, and with no walkthroughs — which is either the point or a dealbreaker.
Front-end-only is a crowded place to be looking for work. Three entries here deal with the server: Node's official Introduction to Node.js guide, the Express.js Official Getting Started Guide, and John Smilga's eight-hour Node.js and Express.js — Full Course, which spends real time on the raw http module before Express appears. That ordering matters more than it sounds. It's the difference between using a framework and understanding one.
Eighteen entries, all free, weighted heavily toward HTML, CSS, JavaScript and React. Two are CSS-specific — the Chrome team's Learn CSS and Mozilla's Learn Web Development. Two cover TypeScript. The gaps show quickly: no Vue, no Svelte, no Angular, nothing on Next.js, nothing on SQL or databases, and nothing on deploying what you've built. There's also a React Native tutorial filed here that belongs on the mobile shelf.
Pick one path and finish it before you start comparing frameworks. The common failure isn't picking wrong — it's picking four times.
OpenJS Foundation
Express's four-page starter guide — install, Hello World, generator, routing and static files, now covering Express 5 and TypeScript setup.
freeCodeCamp
freeCodeCamp's five-library certification — Bootstrap, jQuery, Sass, React and Redux — earned by shipping five tested projects. Two sections are now legacy tech.
OpenJS Foundation
Node's official Learn guide — the runtime, npm, the event loop, streams, files, the built-in test runner and diagnostics, straight from the OpenJS Foundation.
Thirty vanilla JavaScript builds in thirty days from Wes Bos — no frameworks, no build step, just browser APIs, canvas, media and array methods.
freeCodeCamp
freeCodeCamp's rebuilt JavaScript certification - 1,320 test-driven steps across theory, workshops and labs, covering the DOM, accessibility, async and algorithms. Five projects unlock a certification exam.
Google Chrome Team
The Chrome team's CSS course — box model, cascade and specificity first, then Flexbox, Grid, container queries and animation across ~39 modules.
Scrimba
Bob Ziroll's interactive React course — around 11 hours, 170+ coding challenges and six projects, edited live inside Scrimba's in-browser editor.
freeCodeCamp
Bob Ziroll's two-hour TypeScript introduction for freeCodeCamp — annotations, interfaces, unions and basic generics, framed as a layer over JavaScript.
MDN Web Docs
Mozilla's scaffolded JavaScript introduction — 23 articles from variables to JSON, with three challenges and Test-your-skills checks after each topic.
MDN Web Docs
Mozilla's structured learning area — HTML, CSS layout, JavaScript, accessibility and version control across dozens of articles per module, no product to sell.