// the find
wesbos/beginner-javascript
Slam Dunk JavaScript
This is the companion repo for Wes Bos's Beginner JavaScript course — a paid video course, not a standalone learning resource. It contains starter files and finished solutions for ~30 exercises covering DOM manipulation, async/await, modules, and a handful of browser APIs like Web Speech and the AudioContext oscilloscope. Without the course videos, the files are just code to read, not a self-contained curriculum.
The exercise progression is well-structured: you go from basic types and scope through closures, then async, then modules, with a final section that refactors a working app into proper ES modules and then into a bundled build — that arc teaches something real. The finished files alongside the start files means you can always see the target without spoilers if you're disciplined. A few exercises (face detection censorship, audio visualizer, web speech color game) use browser APIs you rarely see in beginner materials, which keeps it from being just another TODO app course. The repo is still getting commits in 2026, so it's not abandoned.
The README is essentially empty — if you land here without knowing the course exists, there's zero guidance on what to do or in what order. There are no tests anywhere, so learners have no feedback loop beyond 'does it look right in the browser'. The exercise numbering has gaps (16, 20, 29, 33... jumping to 55, 72, 75) which suggests the repo only contains a subset of course exercises, but nothing explains which ones are missing or why. Node.js and server-side JavaScript are absent entirely, so someone finishing this still has no idea how JS works outside a browser.