Top 5 JavaScript Courses for Beginners (2023 Updated)
At Frontend Planet, we aim to empower frontend developers with the latest resources and insights to keep them at the forefront of their field. In this guide, we have a core resource for beginners looking to get started with JavaScript.
With the increased JavaScript popularity among tech professionals, we have reviewed the top five JavaScript courses with beginners in mind. Taking these courses will help you learn and build coding skills in JavaScript. This way, you can prove to employers that you have the much-needed skills to work as an entry-level JavaScript or frontend developer.
Overview
- Best Project-Based: Build 20 JavaScript Projects For Your Portfolio (Zero To Mastery)
- Best Comprehensive: The Complete JavaScript Course 2023: From Zero to Expert! (Udemy)
- Best Hands-On: Learn JavaScript (Scrimba)
- Best Free: Learn JavaScript (Codecademy)
- Best Text-Based: The Modern JavaScript Tutorial (JavaScript.Info)
How We Choose the Courses
- Structured Curriculum: These courses offer a well-organized learning path, ensuring beginners can follow a clear and logical progression in their JavaScript education.
- Instructor Experience and Teaching Style: Our selected courses are led by experienced instructors who explain complex concepts in an engaging and understandable manner.
- Content Quality and Depth: The chosen courses provide high-quality content that covers the basics.
- Up-to-date Content: Are these courses updated regularly to reflect industry changes? Yes. We prioritized courses that keep pace with JavaScript's ever-evolving landscape.
- Value for Money: While our list has free and paid courses, we considered the cost-effectiveness of the paid courses. We want to ensure they offer a good return on your investment regarding time used and knowledge and skills gained.
- Hands-On Projects: These courses emphasize practical application by including hands-on projects that allow you to use your newly acquired skills.
Scoring System: We've designed a simple scoring system to help you choose the right JavaScript course. Our scoring system assesses JavaScript courses based on four critical factors:
- Certification
- Up-to-date content
- Affordability (including free alternatives)
- Coverage of advanced content.
We’ve given each course an overall score, with higher scores indicating strong performance across all criteria.
Build 20 JavaScript Projects For Your Portfolio (Zero To Mastery)
This is arguably one of the best JavaScript courses if you want to learn JavaScript while putting your newly acquired hands-on skills to the test. In this course, you’ll build 20 JavaScript projects using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript alongside two industry software engineers.
As one of the best JavaScript courses available online, this course teaches you:
- Asynchronous programming with AJAX, Fetch API, Promises, and Async plus Await
- How to write clean and performant JavaScript code
- How to work with Web APIs
- Building applications using pure JavaScript
- And more
Why We Chose This Course
The best way to learn JavaScript is by hands-on practice, and this course puts your skills into practice. Besides this, having foundational knowledge and experience in building apps without using frameworks and libraries can make transitioning to frontend frameworks like React highly beneficial.
- You get to build an impressive portfolio (20 JavaScript ideas) for your next job hunt
- Learn the UI/UX principles senior JavaScript engineers follow when building apps
- Excellent pace with clear explanations
- Learn how to conduct code review and make your code more performant
- 30-day money-back guarantee
- Paid: Content is locked behind a paywall
- Requires basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JS
| Last Update | September 2023 |
| Instructors | Jacinto Wong and Andrei Neagoie |
| Duration | 34 hours |
| Pricing |
The course has three pricing tiers, including:
|
| Certification | Yes |
| Overall Score | 4.75 / 5 |
The Complete JavaScript Course 2023: From Zero to Expert! (Udemy)
To become job-ready for a JavaScript role, it’s crucial that you learn JavaScript from scratch. As the title suggests, this course takes you from beginner to expert by teaching you how JavaScript works under the hood.
As one of our list's most comprehensive JavaScript courses, you’ll learn the fundamentals of JavaScript, DOM, data structures, OOP, and asynchronous coding. Others include:
- Guidance on structuring your code with flowcharts and standard patterns
- How to think like a JavaScript developer
- Working with modern ES6+ features and concepts
- How to use modern JavaScript tools like NPM, Parcel, Babel, and ES6 modules
- And more
Why We Chose This Course
As one of Udemy's bestselling JavaScript offerings, this course stands out with an extensive array of resources, including eight coding articles, 22 comprehensive tutorials, and 18 essential downloadable assets — all of which we consider indispensable for any beginner who wants to master JavaScript.
- The course includes a one-hour crash course on HTML/CSS
- Fast and friendly support in the Q&A section
- Full lifetime access upon purchase
- No prior coding experience is required
- 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee
- Paid: Content is locked behind a paywall
- Extensive learning time frame due to its lengthy 70-hour duration
| Last Update | June 2023 |
| Instructors | Jonas Schmedtmann |
| Duration | 68.5 hours |
| Pricing | Paid (Priced at $14.99. Please note price varies as this is a discounted price) |
| Certification | Yes |
| Overall Score | 4.75 / 5 |
Learn JavaScript (Scrimba)
If you prefer a free, self-paced JavaScript course, you’ll love this free JavaScript offering from Scrimba. It contains over 140 interactive coding challenges to help build your JavaScript muscle memory.
But what makes this course special? You’ll get to build four projects, including a Chrome Extension, which you can add to your portfolio. In addition, you’ll learn:
- How to work with local storage
- Working with JS fundamentals such as variables, loops, and functions, among others
- How to debug code for errors
- How DOM manipulation works
- And more
Why We Chose This Course
For starters, it’s free, fun, and ideal if you’re looking to learn JavaScript fundamentals before committing to a paid option.
- Free
- Interactive, hands-on content
- Full lifetime access upon purchase
- Friendly and active discord community
- The course requires you to have a basic understanding of HTML/CSS
| Last Update | February 2023 |
| Instructors | Per Harald Borgen |
| Duration | 10.38 hours |
| Pricing | Free |
| Certification | None |
| Overall Score | 4.5 / 5 |
Learn JavaScript (Codecademy)
Codecademy is one of the best online platforms to learn JavaScript for free. It follows a self-paced learning approach with approximately 20 hours of video content, instructor-led discussions, and three projects to practice your newly acquired JavaScript knowledge.
As a beginner introductory tutorial, this course teaches you:
- JavaScript fundamentals such as conditionals, functions, arrays, among others
- How to apply OOP principles in JavaScript
- How to work with JavaScript ES6 object syntax in real-world problems
- And more
Why We Chose This Course
This course offers a concise learning approach, focusing primarily on foundational JavaScript concepts. The course is thoughtfully structured into 11 lessons, each featuring a practical project, ensuring a gradual and hands-on learning experience as you progress from one lesson to the next.
- Free
- No prerequisites
- Features a healthy blend of video and text-based lessons
- Very basic and straightforward
- The certificate is locked behind a paywall
| Last Update | January 2022 |
| Instructors | Kenny Lin |
| Duration | 20 hours |
| Pricing | Free |
| Certification | Paid (To earn the certificate, you may need to switch to the Pro subscription, which costs $23.99/month) |
| Overall Score | 4.5 / 5 |
The Modern JavaScript Tutorial (JavaScript.Info)
Our last JavaScript beginner course takes a different learning approach: text-based. It contains a wealth of JavaScript lessons—not just for beginners but intermediates and experts alike.
Besides offering practical programming practice alongside a ton of course material, here’s what you’ll learn by taking this course:
- Debugging JavaScript code in the browser
- Common JavaScript fundamentals such as classes, objects, data types, among others
- Implementing UI events such as mouse, pointer, and scroll events
- Working with forms
- And more
Why We Chose This Course
Besides the MDN JavaScript docs resource, this course is arguably one of the most well-resourced JavaScript tutorials available online. Even better is that it’s available in many languages and is easy to navigate.
- Free
- Course content is constantly updated
- Extremely well-organized for a text-based resource
- No certificate
- If you prefer video-based learning, there is no video content available
| Last Update | September 2023 |
| Instructors | N/A |
| Duration | Self-paced |
| Pricing | Free |
| Certification | None |
| Overall Score | 4.5 / 5 |
Conclusion
That’s all we have for the best beginner JavaScript courses.
We hope you find these courses suitable for your kind of learning style. Whether you're a beginner eager to grasp the basics or aiming to delve deeper into advanced concepts, we've strived to guide you toward the course that aligns with your goals.
That said, remember to explore our blog section, where we've curated a wealth of supplementary materials and articles tailored to help frontend developers become the best in what they do. Here are some we recommend starting with: