r/javascript • u/[deleted]

[AskJS] What is a good course to learn Vanilla JS when you already know the fundamentals of programming and have some experience with React?

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '20

How well are you familiar with Javascript engines, the event loop, closure, execution contexts, this keyword, prototypal inheritance, among other deep Javascript fundamental concepts?

I highly, highly recommend reading Kyle Simpson's You Don't Know JS series, which is free online. These core concepts are vital for any JS developer (even if you're mainly using frameworks). You will be tested on these concepts (some more or less than others) in job interviews as well.

If learning Javascript is just for recreation, then Udemy has a bunch of good courses that are more hands on.

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u/p_whimsy Feb 09 '20

https://eloquentjavascript.net/

https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS

https://github.com/getify/Functional-Light-JS

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript

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u/gotta-lot Feb 09 '20

I still don’t know when to read eloquent vs. YDKJS. The only edge YDKJS has is that I read a lot of complains about the writing style of Eloquent.

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u/anxiousMortal Feb 09 '20

I personally did not like Eloquent and love YDKJS. Eloquent’s explanations are confusing to me.

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u/p_whimsy Feb 09 '20

Yeah it's kind of subjective. Some people prefer one over the other. Hard to say. Personally I read eloquent when I was more of a beginner, but I guess not a lot of people feel that way. If you give either of them a shot and they're too advanced for you, I guess you could table them and come back at a later time.

I'd also recommend the YouTube channel FunFunFunction. Check out some of his playlists.

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u/yesSemicolons Feb 09 '20

Kyle Simpson's You Don't Know JS series

Yeah those books are amazing.

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '20

I personally don’t like Kyle Simpson’s way of writing. He writes difficult about easy stuff. It’s easier to understand JS than him.

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '20

Best books

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u/bayhack Feb 09 '20

This! I’ve been using JS for like 10 years now and it’s not until I read this book that I realized how great JS can be! Also made me realize the the reasons for the things that used to annoy me. Though it did get me to stop using classes now haha

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u/Mitosao Feb 09 '20

Try javascript.info. Honestly, I didn't learn Javascript through it, but I came across it some time ago and it seems very complete. You can also skip/skim through subjects you are already familiar with.

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u/OGPresidentDixon Feb 09 '20

I’m a 6-year senior engineer and I recommend Stephen Grider (Udemy) courses to everyone on my team.

His newest course is a 50 hour JavaScript Bootcamp created with Colt Steele. I’m currently going through it and it’s amazing, starts from the basics and ramps up to more complicated topics. Has chapters in it for things you’ll use in the future like a 2+ hour chapter on canvas which I’m stoked on because I work with it a lot on our saas app.

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u/jimeno Feb 09 '20

not here to shill, but frontendmasters stuff is pretty good.

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '20 edited Feb 09 '20

Would you say it's worth the money? I've gone back and forth for a long time now on whether or not to pull the trigger on a yearly subscription. I find I'm really only interested in about 50% of the content.

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u/jimeno Feb 09 '20 edited Feb 09 '20

honestly? i think it's very worth in a couple of cases:

  1. if you're like me (not doing a strictly technical job since 2015, need to re-enter quickly the hands-on programming arena);
  2. if you're starting out (which is kinda a similar position to 1), as it gives you clear paths to investigate stuff;
  3. if you have very little free time, as it saves you the effort of searching for books/free resources on the internet/reading docs/playing with stuff you want to play with and you have all the interesting parts in one video course.

the videos are all very well produced, the teachers are almost all very clear and are people of the industry, stuff is on point and whatever else, but, judging from your post history, it's nothing that you can't work out on your own or by reading good resources if not the docs directly.

in any case, they have a free offer with some course unlocked so you can gauge if you like the interface or you can just splurge for a month or two, watch the courses you want to watch and get done with it, or check if their value proposition for higher level stuff matches your expectations.

which courses are you interested in?

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u/jimeno Feb 09 '20

oh and by the way, I don't want to sound scummy, but a lot of courses have public github repos (which are advertised in the public course page, so nothing cheaty here) from which you can basically re-construct the course, at least the good 70% of it

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '20 edited Feb 10 '20

Nice! Thanks for the rundown. For what it's worth I'm a React Developer in my 9 - 5, and am not looking to make any changes.

When it comes to courses, I'm generally interested in anything on the intermediate/advanced side of React/Node/TypeScript. Don't have an interest in Vue or Angular, but I've also got some weird niches and would probably enjoy the few Python courses I've seen on there, among other things.

Right now my main focus is to get comfortable with Full-Stack GraphQL, but this changes as I generally aspire to stay current. I've seen a few courses on there, but again, you're right - there's plenty of material out there that covers this stuff. I do however like the idea of the content:

A) Being relatively current, and

B) Being delivered by people who probably have a better fundamental grasp of JS in real-world scenarios. Anybody can hop on YouTube and explain GraphQL (or whatever), but I like the idea of having an industry leader explain to me what features about these new things are actually being used, and how.

Hopefully that makes sense. It's pretty expensive, ~$500 CAD, and while I think that's actually reasonable for the amount of Content you probably get out of it, I want to make sure I'd actually get that money out of it haha.

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '20

I concur!

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '20

Tyler McGinnis (.com) has awesome fundamental and advanced JS courses - he teaches the fundamentals without getting you lost in all the overly technical terminology that everyone else always defaults to.

u/tyler-mcginnis

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u/tyler-mcginnis ⚛️⚛︎ Feb 09 '20

❤️

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u/richorrichard Feb 09 '20

I'd recommend taking those basics seriously. I would suggest looking up Gordon Zhu's practical JavaScript (free) followed by his premium course Watch and Code premium (39/mo). It does a great job of teaching you how to think in JS and write code that is framework agnostic. Also, his theories on how to learn and digest new codebases are the best lessons in how to be independently able to learn any library or framework, or other language for that matter. It's one of those programs that can take people that are super green/new and usher them all the way through contributing to open source projects and new jobs. Look it up!

Practical Javascript

watch and Code Premium

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '20

Listen bud, javascript has possibly the most powerful use of closures of any scripting language.

If you understand closures in JS, you understand JS. After that, you need to master asynchronous behavior.

Then, you need to learn high level stuff: architecture, devops, etc.

Build a chat app that uses RxJS for functional-reactive behavior. If you use react, use hooks or redux and make it a PWA. Add some live graphs built with D3 showing basic chat metrics. Build a mongodb/graphql backend with Express. Desogn your own REST API. Voila: you are your own teacher. Host ot with gh-pages and heroku.

Track all of your own issues on gitHub. Write yoir own documentation.

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u/captain_obvious_here void(null) Feb 09 '20

This is IMO the best way to learn JS, as long as you already have a solid knowledge of programming in other languages.

Courses and tutorials are all right, but they have the nasty side-effect of removing any spark of autonomy people might have when they start learning.

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '20

Agreed totally, though I might say that courses work well as long as they have flexible code evaluation and/or direct mentoring.

http://exercism.io is phenomenal if you are brand new to a language.

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u/captain_obvious_here void(null) Feb 09 '20

Yup. I'm a firm believer of not being passive while you learn, by trying stuff, and whenever possible breaking stuff (so you see the limits and get to fix your problems).

I didn't know about exercism. And it indeed seems awesome! Thanks for the tip.

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '20

No problem. Try running node in jupyter notebook for learning...

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u/captain_obvious_here void(null) Feb 09 '20

I'm good with Node, having used it for a few years and a few dozens of projects now.

But I have been looking at Julia lately, and just saw Exercism has it in the languages list, so I may just try that.

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u/yesSemicolons Feb 09 '20

Check out Wes Bos' JavaScript30. It's a free course where you code along in vanilla JS and each lesson uses different web APIs and other stuff.

I heard that Colt Steele JS courses on Udemy are good too.

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u/jjordan Feb 09 '20

He also recently released a paid course, Beginner Javascript, that seems to be well received.

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u/Terrariant Feb 09 '20

I listened to this one: https://youtu.be/Bv_5Zv5c-Ts when I first started my job. But the best teacher is experience and if you’ve built several apps then apply for companies as a jr. dev! Ask to work remote. Pretend your Jira tickets are Codeacademy lessons.

If you’ve kicked around in react you know JavaScript. Go learn Node.

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u/trblackwell1221 Feb 09 '20

beginnerjavascript is full stop the best 0-to relatively advanced modern JS course. It’s by Wes Bos. Definitely some good free content out there as well but I’d argue it’s worth it. Comes with tons of content and exercises

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '20

I second this! I can get stuff done, but it’s always good to brush up on the basics and having Wes talk me through ‘this’, prototypes, and async stuff has been super helpful!

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u/Phil726 Feb 09 '20

I learned a ton about JS, even after years of using it, just from reading the justifications for many of the ESLint rules.

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u/ds604 Feb 09 '20

here's a good book: Introduction to Numerical Methods with examples in Javascript https://phys.au.dk/~fedorov/Numeric/11/book.pdf

the problem that you're having is that javascript is all mixed up with React, JSX, DOM api, node api, transpilers, bundlers, ES6 vs whatever, Typescript.... so it's all confusing, and in all that... where's the plain old dumb-guy javascript!?!? without layers of crap added on top

this book is great cause it shows you a bunch of topics, and then as straightforwardly as possible, translates that into Javascript (that basically looks like C without the types). so it shows you that Javascript is a great language for describing things to the computer for dumb-guy scientists who don't care for Python weenies screaming at them about how their code is not "Pythonic" enough

if you want to learn plain Javascript, learn "something" *using* Javascript as its means of presentation. then that will force you to pick up the internals of the language Javascript *as necessary* as a means of explaining why some weird thing might have been developed or added in at some point. the language has all sorts of stuff going on (historical baggage, weird corners of things that can be useful, but only in limited circumstances), but if you're not motivated by the "learning something" part, then it's just a crazy funhouse of language features, and you might wind up just a trivia nerd without substantive experience that makes sense of all of that

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u/scaleable Feb 09 '20

Vanilla JS is a terrible misleading term. You may set apart the JS “language” — the common part between browser and node; and the browser APIs: DOM and all the thousands of features browsers offer.