#Pre-Course Materials
FAC is a very intense course, and you should make sure you're well-rested and ready to work when you get here. However, we would strongly suggest putting the time in to ensure you have a good understanding of a few basics before we get started.
Some of the recommended resources here will take you less than a couple of hours to complete, while others can take a lot longer. We're not expecting you to finish everything, but the course is designed with the assumption that you'll be familiar with these topics by Week One:
Codewars is great for learning JavaScript in isolation, but at FAC you'll be spending the majority of your time working on real projects. Free Camp Code is great for working on your skills in context – we would particularly recommend the HTML5 and CSS & Object Oriented and Functional Programming courses.
However, don't forget that we don't use frameworks at FAC – ignore Bootstrap and JQuery, and make sure you work in vanilla HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
From our experience, you'll also find working on a personal project very useful; check the Intermediate Front End Development Projects section on Free Code Camp for some inspiration, or think of an idea yourself – previous FAC students have built stopwatches, personal websites, and noughts and crosses games.
We love Eloquent JavaScript by Marijn Haverbeke. You may read it online or purchase a copy. Many of us have found it very useful to refer to during the course.
While completing the prerequisites means you should already be fairly comfortable with using JavaScript, in the course we'll be delving much deeper into the language. JavaScript: Understanding the Weird Parts is a great (if lengthy!) introduction to some of JavaScript's more advanced features like callbacks and IIFEs. The cheerfully named CallBack Hell is an excellent quick guide to callbacks and writing asynchronous JavaScript programs.
It will also come in handy to have at least reading familiarity with a few ES6 features you'll likely be seeing a lot: arrow functions, template literals, and the let and const keywords.
FAC ❤️s open source. You'll be using Git and GitHub in everything you build with us, so it's vital you understand how to work with them. We would recommend going through at least one of these courses and, if possible, getting some experience of working on a GitHub repo as part of a group:
####Using the Command Line You'll be using the command line a lot during the course, so do take the time to get comfortable working with it – we can recommend Getting to Know the Command Line as a good introduction.
####DOM Manipulation The #1 thing we wish we'd known more about when we started at FAC is DOM manipulation. MDN and Tuts+ have good guides to the DOM, and you can take a stab at this DOM manipulation tutorial. There's also a handy guide here to different forms of manipulation.
####APIs You'll be using APIs in a number of your projects, so a basic understanding of what APIs are and how they function will be very useful. Luckily, Zapier have published a really accessible introduction to the topic that you should take a look at.
####Chrome Dev Tools
The developer tools provided in Chrome are great for debugging and working in the browser. Free Code Camp has a brief video series that will take you through how to access and use each tool. You may also want to look at Code School's free Discover DevTool's course, especially the first four levels.