Modern JavaScript Tooling, Modules, and Backend Integration

About this course

Updated in May 2025. This course now features Coursera Coach! A smarter way to learn with interactive, real-time conversations that help you test your knowledge, challenge assumptions, and deepen your understanding as you progress through the course. In this course, you’ll learn to master modern JavaScript tooling, modules, and backend integration. By the end, you'll be able to efficiently organize your code using JavaScript modules, both CommonJS and ES Modules, and leverage tools like Node.js, NPM, and Webpack. You'll also gain hands-on experience in setting up backend APIs with Node.js and Express, integrating MongoDB, and deploying full-stack applications. The course empowers you to enhance your development workflow, optimize production code, and build complex applications that span both frontend and backend. Your journey begins with understanding JavaScript modules and their role in code organization and maintainability. You will dive into the basics of Node.js and NPM, learning to install packages and manage dependencies. As you progress, you’ll explore Webpack as a module bundler, configuring it to optimize your code and improve site performance. Additionally, you'll learn to use Babel for transpiling modern JavaScript for compatibility across browsers. The practical experience culminates in building and deploying a full-stack application, integrating both backend and frontend tools. The course continues by introducing real-world development practices, such as integrating MongoDB and Mongoose for data storage, creating a RESTful API, and handling HTTP requests. You’ll also explore the process of deploying your applications on platforms like Netlify, ensuring your projects are accessible to users worldwide. By the end of this course, you'll have a strong foundation in both frontend and backend integration, as well as the tools needed for efficient development and deployment. This course is ideal for developers with a basic understanding of JavaScript who are looking to take their full-stack development skills to the next level. Prior experience with web development concepts and the command line is recommended.