Computer Science Essentials for Software Development

Software developers are in high demand in the current job market, and computer programming is a prerequisite skill for success in this field.

Start your journey toward becoming a professional software developer by learning Java, one of the industry’s most commonly used programming languages.

This course, part of the CS Essentials for Software Development Professional Certificate program, will quickly cover Java syntax and keywords and then explore features of object-oriented programming including encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism. You will learn how to apply these concepts to programmatic problem solving by investigating class modeling techniques and relationships such as aggregation, realization, and generalization.

In addition to programming, you will learn about software testing techniques that help us find problems in our code, and you will use modern development environments and tools for tasks like debugging and unit testing. We will introduce Eclipse, the eclipse debugger and Junit (a unit testing framework).

After completing this course, you will be able to design, develop, and test large applications in Java and understand and apply core principles of professional software development.

Knowing how to code is only part of the skills needed to become a professional software developer.

This course, part of the CS Essentials for Software Development Professional Certificate program, will take your skills to the next level by teaching you how to write “good” software that appropriately represents and organizes data, is easy to maintain, and is of high quality.

As the purpose of most computer programs is to manipulate data, sometimes large quantities of it, the manner in which programs represent and organize data can have an enormous effect on the simplicity and efficiency of the code. In this course, you will learn about important core data structures such as arrays, lists, stacks, queues, sets, maps, trees, and graphs, and learn how to evaluate them and reason about their behavior and efficiency.

Most importantly, you will learn how to determine which data structure is the most appropriate for solving the problem at hand, and see how to use the implementations that are part of the Java library.

However, choosing the right data structure is only part of the challenge of developing high quality software: you must also consider the design of the classes that use those data structures. You will learn about software design principles such as modularity, functional independence, and abstraction, and apply those concepts toward writing programs that are easy to understand, easy to modify, and easy to test.

Although it is important to know how to write high quality code, professional software developers often spend a majority of their time maintaining existing code. You will also learn about software refactoring techniques for improving the design of existing code, and see how to improve code efficiency.

This course will use Java but the concepts you learn can be applied to almost all modern programming languages.

This course is running for one last time and will retire soon. Last day to enroll is November 23rd.

JavaScript is the programming language of the World Wide Web.

As a professional web software developer, you will not only need to know how to program in this simple yet powerful language, but you will need to understand the fundamentals of how data is exchanged on the World Wide Web (WWW) and what tools and frameworks are available to you for creating robust, interactive web applications.

This course, part of the CS Essentials for Software Development Professional Certificate program, provides an introduction to modern web development using JavaScript. In addition to exploring the basics of web page creation using HTML and CSS, you will learn advanced web page layout and responsive design tools such as Bootstrap. You will also learn how browsers represent a web page data using the Document Object Model (DOM) and how to develop dynamic, interactive web pages using JavaScript in the browser. Beyond fundamental JavaScript syntax and advanced language features such as callbacks, events, and asynchronous programming, you will work with jQuery, which provides functionality for simplified DOM manipulation and event handling.

This course will also introduce you to modern web frameworks and component-based libraries such as React.js for efficiently developing modular web page components, and D3.js for creating data-driven documents. We will also teach you how to represent and exchange data using JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), and how to access RESTful APIs on the web.

Server-side JavaScript is becoming more prevalent in the industry, with web frameworks such as Node.js and Express making it simple to create and deploy complex, data-driven web applications. This course will prepare you to use such frameworks and show you how to integrate them with NoSQL databases such as MongoDB.