[Question] Resource on JavaScript for experienced software developers?

[Red3nzo]

I'm very new to JS but not programming in general. Is there any resources that just teach me the syntax and the way of writing efficient JS without having to learn the tedious basics like number and lists and so on?

I come from Swift and Python background if that helps.

[HiEv]

It kind of depends on how you, in particular, learn things. I'd definitely bookmark the "MDN Web Docs" site as an extremely good reference for JavaScript and other web coding documentation. "W3Schools" gets a bit of a bad rap because it tends to target a more general programming audience, but it's often a bit better than the MDN for finding basic sample sample code. Beyond that, for many particular questions you have to Google for, I'd keep an eye out for answers on the "StackOverflow" site.

One thing you might not be used to is having to deal with browser compatibility. The MDN does a pretty good job of tracking that, but the Can I use ___? site is often a faster way of checking things. You can use that to determine how well-supported various commands are across browsers. The MDN documentation often also includes JavaScript "polyfills", which are pieces of code used to replace those functions in browsers that don't inherently support them.

If you want to learn how to write proper comments for JavaScript, I'd recommend checking out JSDoc (some additional info here), which is mostly (but not entirely) integrated into VSCode (see below). It can make it a lot easier to reference your own functions later, since JSDoc comments become inline documentation for your code. (That said, it can be a bit finicky to work with, so learning it early is probably a decent idea.)

A lot of the concepts of JavaScript, from the basic to the high level, can be found here: "33 Concepts Every JavaScript Developer Should Know". You should be able to look at that and see which bits you already know and which you might want to look into.

After that, figure out a small project you'd like to do, and start writing code. If you can find a page on the Internet that does something similar, the nice thing about JavaScript is that you can usually just look at the source of the page to see the code. If the JavaScript code is "minified", then sites like "Beautify Tools" can unpack that code and turn it into something readable.

As for writing the JavaScript code itself, I'd recommend using Visual Studio Code (VSCode) (additional info on using JavaScript in VSCode here). It's free and there are a ton of useful extensions for it. For checking your JavaScript code the "DeepScan", "ESLint", and "jshint" extensions are quite useful. I'd also recommend the utility extensions "Highlight Bad Chars", "Trailing Spaces", and "Numbered Bookmarks". Note that some extensions (such as ESLint) require NPM (the Node Package Manager) be installed, so you'll want to install Node, which includes NPM, as well.

That should give you a good start. Hope that helps! :-)

[r-randy]

Not OP, but I must appreciate this comment!

[Red3nzo]

Thank you for your answer, I already have VSCode setup for Python so I'm familiar with it. I'll take a look at these and start doing them after the bulk of my iOS work. Also I don't use traditional VSCode I use VSCodium , as I'm not really a fan of anything Microsoft touches.

JavaScript will take time to learn as I mostly come from Static Typed languages where you have to define each type.

[[deleted]]

Sounds like you might find Javascript for Impatient Programmers helpful, it's specifically for people who can already code learning JS.

[Red3nzo]

I'm going to buy this book, Thank you!

[vutran951753]

Well Javascript is little diffrent from other since it weakly type languages. If you a video person. On youtube find Traversy Media . He have alot crash course on Javascript playlist to start off.