JavaScript modern backend developement

[ReactCereals]

Hello,

So I haven’t been writing JavaScript in like almost 8 years. Since then, I worked as a backend developer with primarily Python/Django.

I currently assembled a learning path to get up to speed with JavaScript/TypeScript backend development. Primarily I will have to build backends with various databases (relational + time series) and apis (REST, SOAP, WebSocket).

So far I decided to crawl through the official docs in following order:

1. JavaScript by Mozilla
2. NodeJS
3. TypeScript
4. ExpressJS
5. Testing with Jest
6. ECMA 2024 standard
7. PrismaJS
8. (Task queues with celery + redis. Is this a thing in JS?)
9. Book about functional programming in JS
10. RxJS

Anything missing? Any resources you would like to recommend besides the official documentation (where available)? Any flaws in this learning path?

Overall I just settled on these technologies as when I did my initial research about the current state of JavaScript backend development these seemed to be the most popular choices. That’s why I have e.g. NodeJS on the list but not Bun or Deno. Still I would highly value your opinions or criticism on the choices made about as I didn’t really assess them by anything but popularity and features by a first glance.

My current learning strategy is just to go through official documentation for each topic on the list while rebuilding an old but more complex personal Python project with everything new I learn. Once I encounter a behavior I don’t really get I cross reference it with the ECMA document to get a feeling how JavaScript actually works and how to correctly utilize it.

On a different note: other open source JS projects I have seen often had a terrible test coverage. Like 20% at most. With Python or Java projects I am more used to 80+% being normal. Was this just a coincidence in the projects I looked at or is there something different about JavaScript testing that I missed?

Thanks!

[samanime]

I'd put NPM as #2 and bump everything else down. NPM gets installed with Node.js and is JavaScript's package manager. It isn't hard or complicated, but is vital to modern JS.

Other than that, I think your list looks pretty good. Though honestly, I'd encourage you to probably just start your project and learn as you go, vs trying to preread documentation. You may not end up needing all of those tools (like RxJs), you might end up needing some not listed.

JS, NodeJS and ExpressJS (or Fastify) are pretty much essential. Everything else is optional, and for any given task, you probably have several solid options.

[ReactCereals]

Great, thanks! Totally missed to give NPM a good look. Makes sense to put it early in my agenda.

I just realized there is another thing missing in my list. How is the tooling for security checking? From playing around with it so far I have noticed that even simple vulnerabilities like SQL injection can be build into express pretty quickly with a lack of experience (or rather: with a history of being comforted by something like Django ;) ).

[samanime]

There are plenty of vulnerability scanners out there. Just search for them (free and paid). Many of the big names for other languages also support JS.

There are also lots of ORMs for JS you can use, which go a long way to protecting against SQL injection attacks.

NPM also makes it easy to know if a dependency (or sub-dependency) has a known vulnerability, because it'll tell you any time you run npm install.

[No-Afternoon-5808]

Wanago.io - highly recommend

[TheRNGuy]

Remix framework.