Intro to Backend (Udacity)

Offered by Udacity,
Intro to Backend (Udacity)

Starting Out with Web Serving Technology. This course is a selection of material from our larger Web Development course. This course presents an overview of a variety of Web backend topics: handling user input, producing templated output, storing information in databases and data stores, and building systems with secure user accounts.

Class Deals by MOOC List - Click here and see Udacity's Active Discounts, Deals, and Promo Codes.

You want to build Web services and want a place to start. This course gives you the foundational knowledge to do just that.

What you will learn

Forms and Inputs

  • How do web sites handle user input?
  • Build HTML forms and the validation and escaping logic needed to handle user input correctly.

Templates

  • How do web sites produce neatly formatted output for users to see?

Databases

  • How do web sites store data?
  • Use both SQL databases and the Google App Engine datastore in this program.

User Accounts & Security

  • What's a cookie and what does it have to do with logging in a user?
  • How do web sites use cookies, passwords, and other components to provide security?

Prerequisites and requirements
You have a basic working knowledge of the Python programming language, which will be used in this course.
If you're looking to learn or refresh your knowledge of Python and programming, take a look at our courses Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Foundations with Python.

Go to Class
MOOC List is learner-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Related Courses

Internet History, Technology, and Security (Coursera) Coursera
University of Michigan

Internet History, Technology, and Security (Coursera)

The impact of technology and networks on our lives, culture, and society continues to increase. The very fact that you can take this course from anywhere in the world requires a technological infrastructure that was designed, engineered, and built over the past sixty years. To function in an information-centric world, we need to understand the workings of network technology. This course will open up the Internet and show you how it was created, who created it and how it works. Along the way we will meet many of the innovators who developed the Internet and Web technologies that we use today.

Nov 16th 2026
5-12 Weeks
Cryptography I (Coursera) Coursera
Stanford University

Cryptography I (Coursera)

Cryptography is an indispensable tool for protecting information in computer systems. In this course you will learn the inner workings of cryptographic systems and how to correctly use them in real-world applications. The course begins with a detailed discussion of how two parties who have a shared secret key can communicate securely when a powerful adversary eavesdrops and tampers with traffic.

Nov 16th 2026
5-12 Weeks
AJAX for Web Developers (Coursera) Coursera
Coursera Instructor Network

AJAX for Web Developers (Coursera)

The "AJAX for Web Developers" course explores how modern websites update parts of a web page without the need to reload the entire page, providing a fluid and fast user experience. This course covers the relationship between client apps or websites and servers, the distinction between full page loads and AJAX, and the best use-cases for each.

Nov 16th 2026
3 Weeks
Network Security (Udacity) Udacity
Georgia Institute of Technology,Udacity

Network Security (Udacity)

This course provides an introduction to computer and network security. Students successfully completing this class will be able to evaluate works in academic and commercial security, and will have rudimentary skills in security research. The course begins with a tutorial of the basic elements of cryptography, cryptanalysis, and systems security, and continues by covering a number of seminal papers and monographs in a wide range of security areas.

Self Paced
Self-Paced
SQL: A Practical Introduction for Querying Databases (Coursera) Coursera
IBM

SQL: A Practical Introduction for Querying Databases (Coursera)

Much of the world's data lives in databases. SQL (or Structured Query Language) is a powerful programming language that is used for communicating with and manipulating data in databases. A working knowledge of databases and SQL is a must for anyone who wants to start a career in Data Engineering, Data Warehousing, Data Analytics, Data Science or Business Intelligence. The purpose of this course is to help you learn and apply foundational and intermediate knowledge of the SQL language, and become familiar with many relational database (RDBMS) concepts along the way.

Nov 16th 2026
5-12 Weeks
What is Programming? (Udacity) Udacity
Udacity

What is Programming? (Udacity)

A Coding Dictionary. The world of development can be daunting with all of its lingo and jargon. This course will help demystify the cryptic terms that developers use on a daily basis. You'll learn about how the web functions, what a programmer does each day, why version control is so important, and how communication on the internet happens.

Self Paced
Self-Paced
Serverless Data Processing with Dataflow: Develop Pipelines (Coursera) Coursera
Google Cloud

Serverless Data Processing with Dataflow: Develop Pipelines (Coursera)

In this second installment of the Dataflow course series, we are going to be diving deeper on developing pipelines using the Beam SDK. We start with a review of Apache Beam concepts. Next, we discuss processing streaming data using windows, watermarks and triggers. We then cover options for sources and sinks in your pipelines, schemas to express your structured data, and how to do stateful transformations using State and Timer APIs.

Nov 16th 2026
3 Weeks
Data Wrangling with MongoDB (Udacity) Udacity
Udacity,MongoDB University

Data Wrangling with MongoDB (Udacity)

In this course, we will explore how to wrangle data from diverse sources and shape it to enable data-driven applications. Some data scientists spend the bulk of their time doing this! Students will learn how to gather and extract data from widely used data formats. They will learn how to assess the quality of data and explore best practices for data cleaning. We will also introduce students to MongoDB, covering the essentials of storing data and the MongoDB query language together with exploratory analysis using the MongoDB aggregation framework.

Self Paced
Self-Paced
Security Management and Governance (Coursera) Coursera
Royal Holloway, University of London

Security Management and Governance (Coursera)

In this course you will look at some of the key components of practical cyber security management and its governance. This includes what happens when things go wrong, understanding how organisations can respond to incidents, through to the essential role of people in achieving better cyber security outcomes. Together, you will examine how incident management, cyber resilience, and developing an effective appreciation of people, not simply as users but as active participants, can enable better cyber security outcomes.

Nov 16th 2026
4 Weeks