You don’t need to have software development skills in order to be a valuable member of a software delivery team. That said, getting a basic level of comfort and proficiency with writing and reading code can open up incredible new opportunities for you! This course isn’t about teaching you to write hyper-optimized, multi-threaded highly scalable concurrent JSON web services with ORM layers over a NOSQL database. It’s OK, Jim didn’t understand any of that and he wrote this description.

Instead, this course is meant to get you at ease with understanding how software moves from code to executable programs. During this course you'll learn:

• To identify well-written software by taking small steps in building your own application in a test-first fashion.
• Many things which may impact the long-term health and quality of the code your team is delivering.
• Most importantly, that writing code isn’t just about being productive and accurate, you’ll learn that it can also be fun!

Video lessons in this course total roughly 6.5 hours. You can likely expect to spend another 4-8 hours working through the exercises. While that may seem like a lot, each lesson is broken into distinct chunks with the code-related lessons averaging 28 minutes.

Resources you'll use throughout this course:

This course uses Visual Studio Code and .NET Core for both Windows and the Mac. You’ll need to have those installed if you want to do the examples. (And you should. That’s sort of the point of this course, after all…)

• Visual Studio Code
• .NET Core 2.x

An example project is available in Jim's GitHub repository with code examples for each lesson exercise.

Be sure to also check the individual Lesson Resources section in lessons for resources and notes specific to each lesson.