CS50's Web Programming with Python and JavaScript

The course covers amongst others the 2 main python web frameworks Flask and Django. Flask as a lightweight framework, Django for a full-featured solution.

It is a great course on modern web development using python on the server side and javascript on the client, including git, CSS, HTML, animation, SVG, and bootstrap. Also, SQL, ORM, APIs, templating are covered. Everything is explained very well with little hands-on code examples.

The final weeks are somewhat more theoretical on topics like testing, CI/CD, travis, scalability, scaling databases, and caching.

The last week handles security issues on every one of the previous week's topics with good explanations for DOS attacks, SQL injection, cross-site, and more.

The course is quite heavy on workload, every week has 1h45m course video, unfortunately not split in short session. I recommend watching the lectures in smaller chunks of max 30 minutes, which is better to digest the material.

In the early weeks, there is a project assignment every other week, 4 in total. These project assignments need quite some effort, 6 hours or more depending on your experience. This makes it difficult to evenly spread the workload over the weeks. I combined the lectures of 2 consecutive weeks in one week and spent my time of the next week on the project assignment. This was ok for the first 4 weeks, however projects 3 and 4 were heavier.

The submitter for the projects was not available, marked “Coming soon”, even at the end of the 12 weeks of course! The course does not use the discussion forum from edX but refers to all kinds of chat applications. Most of these discussion forums are sparsely occupied, questions seldom answered, and no teaching assistants were available.

In short:
+ top content, excellent instructor, challenging assignments

I would give CS50web easily 5 stars if:
- the lectures were split into smaller chunks
- only one discussion forum was promoted, and
- I could submit my projects and receive feedback

Just like the previous course, CS50 Web is divided into 8 “weeks” (I like to think of these as just ‘sections’, as you can spend any time you want with each), each consisting of a roughly 2-hour video lecture, accompanying lecture notes as well as a project which applies the contents learned in that week’s materials.

As you’ll see, this time the projects are much more substantial than the original CS50’s problem sets, so not every week has a distinct project, instead, you might see that as many as 3 consecutive weeks ask you to contribute to the same project, adding more features relating to that week’s content.

This is also the biggest difference compared to the original CS50. The projects are much more involved and difficult, often taking me several days each to complete. But I think this is actually a very good thing, for several reasons which I will discuss a bit later.