Who is This Course For?

Learn about the intended audience and prerequisites for this course.

Security is fundamental

This course is for programmers that are new to secure development. However, this course is also useful for anyone that is interested in web application development. Web application/JavaScript security is a fundamental part of software engineering on the web, and it is critical to understand. Anyone that writes or reviews a single line of code that powers a web application needs to be familiar with basic security principles. Even a web application that has the potential to radically transform how people interact online won't last long in production if it has security flaws. A secure web application is one that users can trust. A security incident can significantly diminish a company’s reputation and send a user scrambling to delete their account as soon as possible.

Web application security questions often come up in interviews as well. For example, Automattic, the company that built WordPress, famously gives potential hires a take-home assignment in which developers must identify and fix several security vulnerabilities. Also, many companies ask security questions in the initial phone screen to quickly weed out candidates.

In this course, we’ll discuss security principles as they relate to JavaScript-based web applications. However, each lesson, at its core, teaches a valuable software security principle that is language agnostic.

Prerequisites for this course

This course assumes a basic understanding of HTML, JavaScript, and client/server interaction, including the following:

  • Common HTML elements

  • Basic JavaScript syntax

  • Structures of URLs

  • How data is stored on clients and servers

  • How API requests are made

Note: Keep in that, while this course was written with those who have a basic understanding of the items in the list above in mind, extensive knowledge on every single topic is not required, and beginners are encouraged to take this course too!