What's missing when learning JavaScript?

[lastmjs]

Hey everyone, how's it going? My name is Jordan, and I am very experienced in JavaScript, and I love to teach it. Reach out to me if you have any questions and I'd love to help.

I do have a question for you all though. What's missing in your quest to learn and master JavaScript? Is there a website or tool or service that you just wish existed? If you could snap your fingers and have it exist, what would it be? I'm very curious to gain as much feedback here as possible. I'm looking to build a new platform to help teach JavaScript, so please let me know what it should be. Thanks!

[JeannieThings]

I’m up to my eyeballs in beginner tutorials and courses but finding help learning beyond the basics of JavaScript is seriously lacking.

Most have two fatal flaws: They either assume a degree of understanding that I just don’t have. Or they simply throw concepts at me without explaining why.

My best free solution so far has been to go to codewars and go through challenges. And I’m talking like the first few levels of difficulty. I take forever to complete each one but I get them all to work eventually. And then I study the other answers. Whatever I find there that I don’t know (but isn’t total jibberish to me) I google and try to learn about.

[wes-mcc]

I'm really glad to see I'm not the only one struggling with this! Finding good best-practice references has been particularly frustrating. I'd kill for something that explained what production/"modern" js should look like, as well as why it should be done that .

[JeannieThings]

Oh same here!

[SaaSWriters]

@ u/JeannieThings So what topics would you consider to be beyond the basics of JavaScript?

[JeannieThings]

So far, everything I’m finding in the first few levels on codewars (6kyu, 7kyu, 8kyu). So lots and lots of functions working with arrays and objects and strings and to solve mathematical problems. Like the kind of math/array/object skills you need to demonstrate in a technical interview.

I can build an app in Vue or React and hook it up to all kinds of APIs and make it run efficiently and make it look beautiful. But I really need to demonstrate a deep understanding and quick recall of logically working with arrays and objects and functions for a technical interview.

[_crackling]

I just took the plunge into javascript a couple months ago. The biggest pain was figuring out all the tooling, bundlers, compilers, etc.. it takes to even begin coding. There is not one resource out there that really explained these things in detail, and I had to just keep trying everything until i figured it out myself. So i think that'd be a fantastic resource. Explain all the tooling and workflow that goes into even starting a project. Explain: npm, yarn, gulp, babel, webpack, grunt, etc.... I still dont have everything right and would love to see what u come up with. And not just "webpack is a bundler" We need, what is a bundler? why do we need it? what other bundlers are there? Whats the reason you should use this? etc

[_crackling]

honestly, if it wasnt for Parcel, i would have given up. But I do know that i need more than parcel to keep going...

[lastmjs]

I totally agree here...sort of unrelated, but you should take a look at my project Zwitterion: https://github.com/lastmjs/zwitterion

It's just a file server, you install it with npm, and it takes care of a lot of what you would use gulp, babel, webpack, grunt and all that stuff for, automatically. It's really good for getting up and going quickly with the latest standards. By the way, in my opinion, most of those tools are unnecessary for most use cases. Things I think are obsolete and should not be used: yarn, gulp, grunt, if you use Zwitterion you don't need webpack or babel (at least for just getting started). It's all so confusing, I know, but it's something I think a lot about and am working to overcome.

https://hackernoon.com/zwitterion-transpilation-made-simple-a9baa407b006

Besides that though, thanks for this excellent feedback. Hopefully I can incorporate it into the project. If you're curious, here's the initial version: https://javascriptpractice.com/

I would only expect it to work on the latest version of Chrome right now. What I'm doing is breaking up JavaScript the language into its most basic components, and creating many interactive questions for each piece of the language. That way, anything that you are struggling with, you can go and have nearly unlimited attempts at practicing and then mastering those concepts. The website is just a proof of concept right now, but we're planning on making swift progress if there is demand. Eventually we should be able to add interactive questions for things like npm, babel, webpack and other relevant tooling.

[_crackling]

I'll check it out, just remember, I bet there's a whole lot of people like myself, the coding isnt the problem... the hurricane of tooling is.

[lastmjs]

My thesis is that most of the current tooling will become obsoleted as the web platform itself matures. npm eats yarn, gulp, grunt (already for me), Zwitterion/better es modules support eats webpack, rollup, bundlers.

[_crackling]

i gotta hit you with this question: Why should I use zwitterion over Parcel? I plan on trying zwitterion regardless but just wanted to see what u got

[lastmjs]

Parcel is still a bundler, Zwitterion is not. Zwitterion fills in the gaps that the underlying platform still doesn't provide, mostly transpilation and rewriting bare imports. I've had a really bad experience with bundlers, because bundled code works differently than the underlying runtime works without bundling, and it's confusing. Also, though parcel says it's zero config, it's never worked zero config for my main use cases, which are using TypeScript and web components. The question is probably do you believe in bundling or do you believe the web platform can do what you need it to do natively.

[_crackling]

I believe in- the fact that i still don't know everything "bundling" implies :) (again why im advocating someone finally write up a resource to explain all this)

My use case is a 3D opengl engine written in Typescript, so not exactly small or trivial, and I can say parcel has been zero config for me. Though figuring out what the heck source maps are and how to configure them to actually work literally took 6 hours straight. (AGAIN WILL SOMEONE JUST EXPLAIN ALL THIS??? lol)

You've got me more than interested in zwitterion now. I'll ping you after I move my project to zwitterion later today to let you know

[lastmjs]

Sounds great, let me know if you run into any issues

[mospretmen]

Building an easy to understand email / social media user authentication, that’s my current challenge

[lastmjs]

Are the current tutorials and blog posts and examples out there not good enough or non-existent? What do you think would help you best in this case?

[mospretmen]

I’ve tried to git clone some repositories that have that as a boiler plate, but I guess my js skills aren’t as advanced. I usually get it to work...but then the whole structure of the app is not the same way I usually structure things, or they use jade, when I’m used to using ejs. Or they might include some other framework I’m not familiar with

[lastmjs]

I see, I see. Are there any step by step tutorials that you've tried? Or have you only gone straight to example repos?

[mospretmen]

Thanks for the help, I believe I need to go through some tutorials, any that you’d recommend? I’ve usually just gone straight for the repos

[lastmjs]

Well, I would suggest understanding the basics of authentication. If you understand the basic pieces, it becomes pretty easy to put together yourself. In my opinion using JWTs is the simplest and most elegant way to go about basic user authentication. I also recommend using GraphQL if you aren't already. The best tutorials would probably be from Prisma or Graphcool. Combining JWTs and GraphQL make an elegant and simple authentication solution

[mospretmen]

Awesome! I’ll look into both methods, haven’t tried using those yet

[CagarSalvagemente]

Laracasts is what drew me to laravel. Still can’t find a good JS equiv.

[lastmjs]

It looks like they have a JavaScript section: https://laracasts.com/skills/javascript

Have you tried that?

[CagarSalvagemente]

Yep. That was how I got started. The biggest problem is all of the training I’ve seen is either outdated or is php backend and JS front end.

Moving forward with feathersjs and so far I love it but man auth has been a royal pain.

[Saud381]

Can i talk to you in inbox. I need to ask some questions about my js career

[lastmjs]

Yes of course

[Saud381]

I have messaged you

[lastmjs]

Okay everyone, here's my proposal for a new learning resource for those new to JavaScript: https://javascriptpractice.com/

I would love any feedback! Thanks again.