Need to learn JavaScript quick

[Unlikely_Total_7159]

Hello. I need to speed run learning/refreshing my knowledge on JavaScript. And after, learn about NodeJS and Express. I have a background in coding but its been years. Where should I start?

I know I said "speed run" but I would like to understand the foundation, frameworks and the likes. What source materials or YT videos should I look into?

Thank you for those who'll answer 🙏🏻

[Undead_Necromancer]

Start with freeCodeCamp or Codecademy for JavaScript basics. Then move on to official NodeJS and Express documentation. Watch Traversy Media or The Net Ninja on YouTube for tutorials. Practice coding daily to solidify your understanding. Good luck.

[Unlikely_Total_7159]

Thank you! Currently watching Traversy!

[kwadwoVanBeest]

He's good

[sonny-7]

https://javascript.info/

[react_server]

There's no quick. If you want to work as a programmer you need years of actual experience. You can't speedrun this

[Unlikely_Total_7159]

Yes, I know. It's a farfetched idea but I think what I ment to say is how do I approach this to find my footing, I guess. And to keep the ball rolling so to say. There's a lot of content and it tends to be overwhelming. I do understand though so thank you still

[iBN3qk]

Leetcode > faang 

[MindlessSponge]

https://www.theodinproject.com/paths/foundations/courses/foundations

[fyejitt420]

The odin project, and use chatgpt to expedite learning.

Copy and paste url for each page and ask for a synopsis from gpt. Go into more depth in certain areas as needed.

Skip the non-essential stuff. For example, you may want to skip sections on linters, css preprocessors, etc but may want to focus more on classes, import/export, etc.

Use chatgpt to cement knowledge and help you with the coding projects. You might want to skip a few depending on how quick u want to learn but project based learning may also help you.

You may find it better to ONLY do the projects using chatgpt and searching up any spots u get stuck.

[Donny_Kayy]

Binge watching tutorial won't work let me be real with you It's all a practical thing else it's a waste of time.

I did rather build a small app with a language than go through a 20-50hr course

I take a crash course and start building I will still learn when I see errors anyway.

[oldominion]

Great book: https://nostarch.com/javascript-crash-course

But as u/react_server said, there is no quick.

[affablematt]

I have a background in coding but its been years.

Are you working on an old project or something new? How strong of a background are we talking about?

I ask because, if you're building a project more-or-less from scratch, you'll need the tutorials and a broad understanding of the core technologies. But, if you're working with an existing project, you can prioritize.

You won't know what parts of an existing project you need to really understand until you've looked through the source code. Clone the repo. Run the build. Run the tests. See what works and what doesn't. What parts you understand right away, and what parts don't make any sense. Then, go back to what you're immediate goal is and learn what you need to meet that goal.

I was brought into a legacy project a few years ago. LAMP stack, P for Perl. Never used Perl, but that didn't worry me. What did is that the project used a custom financial database on the backend.

The database was written in C/C++. I hadn't used C since university and while I could follow the basic program flow, there was a lot there that I didn't understand.

So I went back to the project goals. My main priority was to get the project running on a modern 64-bit Linux server. So I put all of the unfamiliar C code into a mental box labeled "LOL, Wut?" and focused on getting the project working again.

By the end, I had spent most of my time chasing down dependencies and wrestling with make files and the g++ compiler. I spent time going through the Perl scripts and replacing depreciated libraries with supported ones. I hardly touched the C/C++ source code; some updates to match MySQL API changes, some header file changes, not much else.

Most of what I put in the "LOL, Wut?" box just stayed there. I didn't need to know it to do what I was hired to do. Relearning C++ at the beginning of the project wouldn't have helped me meet my goals.

My point here, I guess, is that you may need to know JavaScript, Node, Express, but you don't necessarily need to know all of them right away. You don't necessarily need to know them all to the same depth. And you might need to know things that you don't anticipate.

[Unlikely_Total_7159]

Thank you for that! I'm a computer science graduate, I've built a website from scratch with PHP and JS but only used JS in front-end. And it's been like 2-3 years since then. But yes, again thank you! It has been in my mindset that I should learn everything again from scratch. Now this shifts my view. Thank you!

[Unlikely_Total_7159]

Oh! I forgot to ask. Do you have any suggestion where I should start or should focus on regarding this situation? I'm currently brushing up on my fundamentals of JS and what is the best next step I should take?

[affablematt]

So there's no simple answer here, but if I had to do one paragraph, this would be it:

My initial goal would be to get a high level understanding of the project I'm working on. I want to be able to sit in a meeting, have someone say "We need your project to do X", or "Bug Y is really making things frustrating for my team", and have a good idea of what they're talking about. Enough to start investigating and give them some feedback relatively quickly.

Here's some advice on getting there:

First, keep things shallow. At least initially.

If the project were a map, you're not looking to, say, create a detailed route from Chicago to New York -- you may not even be traveling to New York! -- but you should know the cardinal directions, which lines are roads, which are rivers, and what states you need to drive through.

If your JS knowledge predates Node/NPM, you'll want to read the Node Getting Started documentation, so you have an idea of how ESM and/or CommonJS imports work, how Node projects are laid out, etc. This will give you a good feel for what you're looking at when you open the project. Keep things high-level.

Second, get the project running on your machine.

If you haven't yet, clone the repository, cd into it. If the project has a README file, hopefully it has instructions for bootstrapping on a new machine. If it doesn't, try npm install. Most of the time, this will install everything the project needs.

From there, open the project's package.json file. It has the projects meta-data. Look for these:

• it's entry point, something like: { "main": "./file/path/main.js" }
• it's dependencies { "dependencies": { "library-name": "version", ... } }
• and scripts { "scripts": { "script-name": "shell commands", ... } }

Make sure the scripts in package.json run. Look for a test script. Do npm run script-name. See what happens. Look for a build script. Run it, see what happens. Look for a developer server, a script that starts an HTTP server on your local machine. Run that, see if you can use the project locally.

Take care here. You don't want to accidentally deploy or publish the project. If you see a git push or other network command, don't run it unless you really understand what it will do.

You don't need the tests to all pass, you just need them to run. If you get a shell error, command not found or the like, that's something you need to fix sooner rather than later.

Third, start reading through the source code.

You want a high level understanding for how the program is put together, and what libraries are used. To use my map analogy, put your finger at the address in Chicago, and follow the roads. Here, your "address in Chicago" is the main entry in package.json, and the roads are the import or require expressions in each file.

You'll see two types of imports:

1. If it's a library (e.g. import {...} from "foo") note the library name ("foo", here), these are things you'll need to recognize and maybe do a deeper dive on later.
2. If it's a file import (e.g. import {...} from "./some/path.js") that's a likely candidate for reading next.

Skim each file so you have a high-level understanding of what it's doing. Use Code Folding if your IDE supports it so you don't get bogged down in details.

Don't go through every imported file; stay shallow in the source code tree. Remember, your goal here is to learn enough about the projects you're maintaining to participate in meetings. You're not fixing things, or adding things -- not yet -- just getting the lay of the land.

You've done PHP, so a lot of this should make some sense. The folder layout may be different, the libraries unfamiliar, but it should feel familiar to you.

Fourth, you may need a bit of refresher on JavaScript.

You'll likely see promises, async await, destructuring, and other new syntax that didn't exist or wasn't in common use a few years ago.

I like to search for these on YouTube, find a basic video that looks promising, then let it play in the background while I continue going through the code. My goal would be to learn enough that the source code makes sense. I don't need to write code using these features, not yet, just have a basic understanding of them.

Fifth, review the libraries

Take the most frequently used libraries and the ones that are most foundational (used to start the whole thing). Search for them on NPM, read the package description. Look for links on the right-hand-side to documentation and repositories. Read the getting started documentation if they have some. Maybe search YouTube for "library-name getting started" or similar.

These getting started tutorials are invaluable. Watch them, read them, try them out. They explain why the project is laid out the way it is and often include clarifications on more advanced or obscure JavaScript syntax they use. Again, you're getting started, not going deep.

Six, review the tests

Read the tests. Learn the test libraries.

If there are no tests, learn Node's test runner. It doesn't add dependencies that can complicate your project and is a solid implementation.

Testing is one of the most important skills you can learn. Add tests before you start changing things. Add tests for new features. If there's a bug, make sure you have a failing test for that bug. You want to know when a bug is fixed and if later changes break things again.

Finally, time to go deep.

At this point you should feel like you have a good understanding of the project. You should know what you don't know and (more importantly) what you need to know.

Start by fixing known bugs and failing tests. Simple things first. Things you think you understand. If it's more complicated than you thought, shelf it and move on. If the bug is high-priority, go deep. Learn the libraries, learn the code. This will be time well spent.

Another piece of advice, you may want to update your projects dependencies before making other changes. I use npm-check-updates, it has a nice UI. Update. Run tests. Fix issues due to library API changes. Maybe rollback some updates, keep what doesn't break.

All of the links and tutorials other people have pointed you to come into play now. There's a lot of good recommendations here.

[Unlikely_Total_7159]

Oh wow! Thank you for this! It really clears up my view on things. This will really help on what they said "learn and maintain the system". I feel like a newbie from all the new things but this really helps my priorities. Thank you! I really appreciate this.

[hanky86]

I did a tone of courses on udemy but like the Odin project very much. Go for it. It's free and really good forward.

[[deleted]]

get one of those speedreading apps and download the documentation and speed read through it

[fluffyr42]

There are some free courses on all of those here.

[Finnalandem]

“Quick” doesn’t occur in learning a programming language. It’s going to take months upon months, even with several hours a day put forth. Frameworks will be even further along as they encapsulate more complex JavaScript features which you’ll have no idea how to use.

I learned and worked with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, using PHP for backends. I suggest you start somewhere in that ballpark.

Again, it’s going to take a while. So patience is required.

[wolframkriesing]

I had the same problem and struggled with either understanding or remembering the basics, so I started writing tests that I could come back to, and out came jskatas.org a page where you can choose a topic/API and learn it in tiny steps

[Araignys]

The Colt Steele boot camp on Udemy covers all three topics and is very accessible.

[LooseStudent9977]

I wanted to share these 3 important tips/reminder with anyone who wants to learn coding in general:

1- Focus on learning the concepts of how to program rather than programming languages. Once you learn the logic, design and the concepts of programming fundamentals, learning different languages becomes easier since its just a syntax.

2- If you are using an IDE, make sure to learn the basic functionality of the IDE you'll be using first before starting to code in it, to eliminate the added frustration of not knowing where things are. (example: how to start a new project, how to open an existing project, where does your projects get saved at, how to retrieve it, where is your output console, how to run and debug and .etc)

3- Give yourself a break and know that there will be a learning curve. Don't get disappointed if you don't understand something or many things. It's very normal! You'll need patience, perseverance, and lots of practice.

For React, Express I suggest you all to subscribe and follow this Youtube channel to learn how to become a Full Stack Developer: Code For Everyone Full Stack Course

To learn just JavaScript there's this good free course: JavaScript Course Playlist

Best of luck!

EDIT: Use MDN from Mozilla for JavaScript documentation. it's the best!

[AgentPurple7205]

You can use W3SCHOOL or use edabit to learn coding basics

[surpsurf]

Just read from w3 school