A premium interactive course for building modern websites using the Astro web framework
by Chris Pennington
Coding in Public on YouTube
In a world of overly-engineered web frameworks, Astro promises a crafted simplicity with excellent developer experience and even better performance.
Yet there’s a sneaky amount of complexity available to you when building with Astro. Start simple—by all means! But as soon as you need it, Astro can:
…and much, much more…
Astro started with a laser focus on content. While still the best option for content-heavy sites, Astro has grown to support a wide range of use cases. The question is: Do you know everything Astro can do?
Astro moves fast…like FAST, FAST! In just over a year, Astro has dropped three major versions. And even between versions, they’ve silently added massive features—like middleware!
Keeping up with all the tools and features is half the battle. I want to help! I’m currently using Astro for nearly a dozen production sites ranging from simple landing pages to near full-stack apps with middleware, auth-protected routes, real-time databases, and more!
Everyone learns differently, but something as fast-moving and exciting as Astro requires a similar approach. You can spend hours reading the Astro docs, track every RFC to production and read the discussed proposals, attend the weekly Community Call to hear the latest updates, build new features into real production sites each week, and more!
That’s what I do! It’s an incredibly effective and worthwhile approach, but it takes a lot of time and isn’t for everyone.
Let’s speed up that process for you. I’ve been coding Astro sites since the early betas and have put together what I know into this self-paced, project-based online course.
The course will focus on using Astro’s built-in tooling and features instead of implementing third-party libraries, tools, and products. When you finish, you’ll have a solid understanding of how to build a modern website with Astro using any tooling or system you prefer.
The course will cover the following topics. If you have any additional questions, please view the frequently asked questions.
Section 1: Core Astro
An overview of the basic concepts of Astro websites.
Building components using Astro’s custom syntax.
Render markdown and MDX components and routes in Astro with page-based routing.
Define and query type-safe data with Astro's content collections.
Learn rendering options and routing in Astro.
Build a personal portfolio site with Astro.
Section 2: Astro Tools
Optimize local or remote images with Astro.
Learn how to set up dynamic endpoints in SSG and SSR.
Learn how to work with Astro’s database solution.
Configure middleware to inject dynamic behaviors on page request.
We’ll put all our middleware understanding to use by adding Auth to the project
Transition between pages using the View Transitions API via Astro’s helpers.
Astro provides a simple way to internationalize your site using the i18n helper.
Installation options, Astro integrations, Dev toolbar, and more!
Section 3: Astro Projects
Astro provides multiple ways to integrate with a CMS. We will explore three options with a simple project structure to understand the types of CMS options you have when using Astro.
We’ll put all our lessons to work in this module building out a full CRUD application for saving and tracking books to read using OpenLibrary’s API.
Giving special attention server vs client code, we'll build out a basic SSR e-commerce website with vanilla JavaScript using Stripe’s SDKs.
applied:
The course includes:
The course is up-to-date with Astro 5 and I plan to keep it updated with new content as Astro continues to develop.