Up to this point in the course,
you already learned a lot about web development,
about front-end web development
and building nice websites with HTML, CSS,
and browser side JavaScript,
and you learned a lot about back-end development,
also about data storage with databases and file uploads.
But one super important concept and feature is missing,
a feature which you don't need on every website,
but on a lot of websites,
and that would be user authentication.
In this course section,
you are going to learn how you can add
user authentication to any website,
so how you can enable users to sign up and create profiles
and then log in with their credentials into your website.
Now, of course, as mentioned,
not every website needs that.
If you're building a blog
where visitors should only be able to read your blog posts,
those visitors don't need to log in necessarily.
But, of course, a lot of websites do.
If you're building an online shop
where users can place orders,
you might need an account for every user
so that users have to log in and in their account,
they can then view their past orders, things like that.
And because of that,
it's, of course, super important as a web developer
to know how authentication works
and how you can add it to a website.
And hence, that's exactly what we'll cover
in this course section.
You will first learn what exactly authentication is
and how it works,
and then we're going to implement it.
We're going to implement sign up and log in functionalities
on a demo website in this course section.
And you will learn that for authentication,
there are two extremely important concepts
in web development which you absolutely have to know
in order to implement authentication.
And that would be sessions and cookies.
These are two concepts
which are not just used for authentication,
you can also use them for other things
as you will learn in this section,
but they are super important for authentication.
So whilst you can use them for other things,
user authentication, as we will cover it in this section,
won't work without sessions and cookies.
And therefore, this will be a feature
and knowledge-packed course section
with a lot of new knowledge for you and therefore,
let's not waste any time and dive right in.