Free online courseAPIs

Course Description

Turn your backend ideas into working services by learning how APIs are built, structured, and delivered in a real Node.js environment. This free online course guides you from the first steps of setting up Node to creating servers that respond with HTML and JSON, helping you understand how modern web applications communicate behind the scenes. Along the way, you will develop the mindset of a backend developer: thinking in requests and responses, organizing code for reuse, and making choices that keep applications maintainable as they grow.

You will start by establishing solid fundamentals such as how Node.js runs on the V8 engine, how the global environment works, and how modules and require() help you split your application into clean, reusable parts. From there, you will explore the event-driven nature of Node and learn why concepts like event emitters matter when building scalable services. You will also work with the file system, understanding how data can be read, created, and handled efficiently.

As the course progresses, you will get practical experience with client-server communication and the HTTP protocol, including streaming data with buffers, readable and writable streams, and piping to simplify moving data through your application. You will then build out server responses for different content types, add basic routing, and move toward a workflow used in professional projects with npm, package.json, and development tools that improve productivity.

To accelerate your API development, you will step into Express and learn how routing, parameters, middleware, query strings, and POST handling come together to form a clean request pipeline. Finally, you will connect your work to persistence by exploring NoSQL concepts with MongoDB and applying database operations inside an application context. By the end, you will be prepared to design and implement practical API endpoints, understand the backend components that power real products, and continue toward more advanced services with confidence.